hsenag

> I really wish darcs was rebooted and made a comeback. What can we do to make it happen?

The biggest thing we need is more developers.

You could always go back to emailing around file changes :-)

Most VCSes including git have some level of complicated algorithms behind them. Darcs does have significant weaknesses when it comes to handling conflicts but the core logic of figuring out how to apply changes to files has been pretty solid for its entire existence.

It's based on "patches" (which was what the original comment was referring to).

A Darcs patch is somewhat like a diff, in that most patches will describe a sequence of text to be removed and added from specific points in each file.

But: Darcs patches add:

- The ability to work out precisely how to apply the same patch in a different context in a reproducible way (or to refuse to do so if it can't do it safely) - More "semantic" kinds of change such as replacing all occurrences of a token in a file, or renaming a file. In both cases this will merge cleanly and reproducibly with other changes to the same file.

Even if previous VCSes (edit: other than Darcs) used diffs internally to store changes efficiently, they were still inherently snapshot based.

I think Git's advantage was mainly from using Merkle trees rather than specifically that it was snapshot based.