[slime-devel] Re: SLIME Committers

[Christian Lynbech]

I would like to warn that darcs has some definite performance
problems, allthough slime is so small that it is unlikely to be a
problem.

After having sufficiently tired with CVS, I went on a quest to find a
more moderne replacement. I arrived, at darcs after an uneasy period
using TLA/Arch, following a number of excited reviews in the lisp
community.

However, I have twice (with different projects) experienced that
merging between repositories stopped working. Darcs uses some hairy
lazy-evaluation analysis of the complete patch combination graph to
determine dependencies and this is what broke, I think. In one
instance it just kept on working, and after 23 hours I lost patience
and gave up, whether it was due to an endless loop in the code or a
combinatorial explosion in the data I shall not say, but work it did
not.

In fairness, one example was my homediretory where I keep dot files
under revision control to exercise control and to enable safe moving
of information between my various accounts. It is rather impressive
how many files and directories that accumulates in ones homedir over
time, so this was clearly putting some stress on darcs. The other
exmple involved a number of binary files which may have contributed to
the problem.

As I said, I do not think that slime is in any direct peril but those
experiences made it hard for me to trust darcs, all its other nice
features aside. 

I am now a happy subversion user. One of the strong points for
subversion in my book is that it is developed by some of the old CVS
notabilities.


------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech       | christian #\@ defun #\. dk
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Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                                        - petonic at hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)