Just my two cents about the VCS topic, coming from my long experience
in using such softwares, also in very critical environments (I was the
"librarian" in a military project, with about 100 developers and
managers over 3 countries).


> I checked out Darcs itself and it took 15 minutes; while checking out
> Git or Mercurial took only one or two minutes.  The slowness of Darcs is
> well-known, many people are talking about it.

The last time I used Darcs in a distributed environment it was so
buggy and slow that I replaced it with tla/bazaar. Darcs took 48 hours
to merge two branches of 2Mb of sources each (I'm not kidding!) and I
decided to to throw it out. It's *AWFUL*.


> Both Mercurial and Git are used by first-class open-source projects (the
> kernel, Mozilla ...).  Darcs has only GHC and Darcs (duh!).

I dare ask why... ;-)


Now I'm using GIT, both in my personal projects (distributed
environment, but only three developers and a simple situation, without
deadlines) and for my job (distributed env., but many developers and a
complex situation, and customers deadlines every 15 days).

GIT pros:
 + speed: it's the fastest VCS I never used;
 + standard: I think GIT will become the new de-facto standard in the
next 12-24 months;
 + documentation: GIT has a *really* good and complete documentation;
 + simple: it is very simple compared with anything else, but this is
of course a personal opinion;
 + most important: it's rock solid, no doubt at all on this point.
Bugs are corrected in hours, sometimes by Torvalds.

GIT cons:
 + does not work properly under Windows, at this moment. The Cygwin
package works well (I personally use it), but AFAIK a native Windows
port is not available. This may be a problem.

Hg should be ok, but I never used it. It's similar to GIT and runs
under Windows.

And I consider any centralized VCS (SVN, CVS) as dinosaurs completely
useless nowadays.


-- 
                                            Paolo


Paolo Donadeo, Senior Software Engineer
Studio Associato 4Sigma
Email: p.donadeo@4sigma.it
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