Priorities

Our current priorities in Darcs are to

1. make darcs faster and more comfortable for its current users,
2. build it on solid foundations, and
3. explore the future of revision control, particularly by expanding our use of high-level patches to new domains.

See below for elaboration on the three points.

Context

Darcs has a unique approach to version control. Rather than tracking repository states, we place a special emphasis on what goes between the states, in other words, “patches”.

We do not currently recommend Darcs for large projects, or for projects that need explicit history tracking. Darcs’ performance is improving, but still has a way to go. The lack of explicit history can make code archeology harder. We think these are short-term problems which we can fix with time and dedication.

So what are Darcs’ strengths? Our initial emphasis on patch-based revision control has given us ease and flexibility which we think are hard to reproduce elsewhere: (A) easy user interface and mental model - your repository is just a set of patches, (B) cherry picking everywhere - in Darcs it’s easy to pick out exactly the patches you want to pull, undo, email, etc without worrying about their dependencies (C) semantic patches - darcs tracks high-level changes like “rename file foo.c to bar.c” or “replace token fizzle with fozzle in foo.c”. In the future, we hope to have patches that, e.g., let us think of XML files as trees. We work on Darcs because these ideas are important to the future of DVCS; we hope that other systems will steal them from us!

Priority 1: Making it faster for current users

We aim to improve Darcs scalability enough for users with small repositories (GHC would be a good typical user) will find it very fast and comfortable.

It would be nice to also take on medium to large repositories, but for now, the main priority is to target our current users and move on to our other priorities. Once we have addressed the foundations on which Darcs is built, we will revise our mission to target very large repositories.

Priority 2: Solid foundations

This means two things right now: improving the code quality and developing Patch Theory 3.

Priority 3: Revision control research

Darcs is different from the other DVCSes out there because we work with a high-level representation of changes. This puts us in a very good position to break some new ground. How about a Darcs with tree-manipulation patches? This would mean being able to version control XML documents beyond their textual representation. Or how about bug tracking patches? We should embrace the fact that Darcs is weird and wonderful, and keep trying that new thing, keep trying that clean idea.