The same friend who wondered about how to share a Git repo over HTTP dared to suggest that “It’s so easy with Hg…”. While I happen to disagree that it’s easier in Hg than Git, I think this flow chart successfully demonstrates that, on this front, Hg and Git both suck ass when compared to Darcs.

P.S. Yes, while 100% factual, the graph is also intentionally silly.

A flow chart for a friend demonstrating, step by step, how you’d go about using Darcs (or any other distributed version control system) with SVN / CVS. He needs to do it for the most common reasons:

1. it’s a pain to branch and merge with CVS.\
2. he’d have to coordinate with other departments like QA to get them working off of whatever the current release branch happened to be at the moment and convince them that it was a good idea.
3. currently his co., like so many, is working off of a single development trunk. There are no other branches.

Click on the image to get a full sized version. Or download the dia file here.

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. Using SVN with a distributed version control system also gets you a cannonical, no doubt about it, central repo, instead of just a repo that everyone agrees to call the central one, plus you can utilize all those nifty notification and stats tools people have written for svn.