I strongly recommend everyone accustomed to ‘common’ DVCSes to have a look at darcs. It will likely only take 10 minutes to understand how is repo different from other dvcd and grasp a little of patch theory. Oh, and 5 minutes for ui (yes, it's really that simple)
I have used darcs a lot. But when our repo contained more then 1000 patches it becomes very slow. For example source file annotation took more than 2 minutes. I have tried optimizations, tagging etc. without bigger improvements. I still like darcs for its simplicity, cherry picking, great interactivity, etc.. However i need something a little bit faster. Another disadvantage is poor emacs support.
I suspect they're mixing theory with practice. The darcs theory is very good. But that doesn't mean you have to limit yourself to it. They could add memoization or git-style content-addressing as a backup to the patch theory.
I suspect that the majority of development and patch-rewriting happens in the most recent set of patches. There's probably a more than exponential drop-off in editing earlier patches.
Caching full repo / file information about earlier patches could speed darcs up to git-like levels.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 18.8 ms ] threadI suspect that the majority of development and patch-rewriting happens in the most recent set of patches. There's probably a more than exponential drop-off in editing earlier patches.
Caching full repo / file information about earlier patches could speed darcs up to git-like levels.