If you’ve ever: made a commit and then realized you forgot “one little change”. made a commit and regretted it. wished you could combine some the past couple days worth of commits into one nice combined commit in the main branch. wished you could commit just part of a file. needed to drop work on one task and switch tracks to another one without having to make commits with unfinished changes, or commits with changes for one issue and a little of another.

Using Darcs with Subversion / CVS Some of you have gotten the distributed version control religion (If you haven’t, you should read my Best Practices essay) but are stuck with Subversion (or CVS) either because that’s what they use at work or because some part of your deployment systems use it. You may also want to combine them simply because of the power of svn externals which lets you pull in some of your code from constantly updated , Subversion Based, 3rd party repositories.

I was reading some articles yesterday that finally made the light bulb go off about distributed source control management (scm) and why we should be using them. First off, a distributed scm, unlike CVS or Subversion, has no central repository that all others pull from. It’s possible to set one up and say that it’s the master and tell people to pull from and push to it but that’s more a matter of convention.