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Comment by pmeunier | Hacker News Reader

They're not just diffs indeed, they have a bit more information, see an example there:

https://nest.pijul.com/pijul/pijul/changes/XTMYHJZLWWT5I2PJA...

First, there are explicit dependencies, and also each section starts with a somewhat cryptic machine-readable description, for example:

B:BD[2.1195] → [2.1195:1291]

One of the challenges in the new version of Pijul was to find a description that was printable in text, and not too-unintelligible to humans.

Darcs isn't alpha, but merges patches in exponential time, which was the initial motivation for Pijul.

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I'd still like to know if you're claiming Darcs 3 (which may or may not be at a similar stage of development) still has that issue (which I don't remember biting me). I've no particular axe to grind as a Darcs user, as long as I have a nice patch-based system.

I don't think Darcs 3 was even started. Darcs 2 recently solved the exponential merge, but it is now quadratic (which is still exponentially slower than Pijul instead of double-exponentially).

I've also been really happy with Darcs, expect for two things:

- Conflicts are not handled very well, as if they were not properly stored internally. `darcs revert` on a conflict doesn't always do what I expect.

- The fact that it doesn't scale (even with the quadratic algorithm) means that big users can't adopt it, which means that too few people write tools for it (including a hosting website: I'm aware of hub.darcs.net, but there are many things missing, including on security). Darcs is hard to install on platforms such as Windows. Also, few people know it, which means that it's hard to collaborate using it.

I should have explicitly said the version 3 theory, which has an imlpementation in Darcs 2.16. I've never seen worst case quadratic complexity, like quicksort's, labelled exponential before, which seems misleading. I think there's more to practical scalability than worst-case asymptotic complexity, even if guaranteed linear is likely a good start; have the two been compared for Linux or GCC, for instance? I'd be happy to use the best combination of speed and features/usability.

I just set up Trac for Darcs hosting -- though it has some tension with the Subversion model -- exporting to git for people who want the pain. I'd investigate Sourcehut integration if I had the time.

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