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Darcs is not obviously better than git, and I say that as a person that's used Darcs for many, many years (and who has at least patch in the Darcs codebase).

Darcs main feature is the simplicity of its data model. Just a pile of patches that compose to produce some code. Push and pull them at will. It's very neat.

Darcs used to have the advantage a nice interactive UI, but git pretty much stole it wholesale with all the '-p' options (git add -p, git checkout -p, git reset -p) so it doesn't win there any more.

Darcs also has the massive downside of not being able to hold more than one branch at a time in a directory. Do you want to switch contexts? 'darcs get' to a new directory and start over. On my most active darcs project I have about 50 directories all with random unpushed WIP patches in them. In git that would just be a bunch of stashes, which are much easier to search through.

Nowadays, if I start tweaking a project that is still in Darcs, I'll immediately switch it to git: https://github.com/purcell/darcs-to-git




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