# SCM for a Rails project - Darcs or Subversion? **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [April 20, 2006, 11:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scm-for-a-rails-project-darcs-or-subversion/58295 "2006-04-20T11:09:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/a4c791/32.png) [@alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alder)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2006, 11:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scm-for-a-rails-project-darcs-or-subversion/58295/1 "2006-04-20T11:09:59Z")
Hi everyone. I’m choosing an SCM for my current Rails project. Up until now, for my other (non-Rails) codings, I used Darcs and liked it very much. I’d prefer to use Darcs for my Rails development as well. Looking into the matter, I’m somewhat deterred by the appearant dominance of Subversion as the SCM tool of choice for Rails hackers. Is there a technical reason for this dominance? Should I avoid Darcs and instead use SVN for my Rails development? Should I expect poor Rais’ tools support of Darcs compared to SVN? I’ve already noticed RadRails tightly integrates SVN, and the large amount of online/offline (the Agile book) discussing SVN with Rails, while Darcs - Rails only yields a single - good but short and very basic - blog post. That said, I found SVN itself to be an overkill and less suitable for my zen of development, and would like to stick to Darcs also for Rails if the cost isn’t too high. Regards, Alder ---
**Author:** ![alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/a4c791/32.png) [@alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alder)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2006, 11:50am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scm-for-a-rails-project-darcs-or-subversion/58295/2 "2006-04-20T11:50:20Z")
Alder G. wrote: > and instead use SVN for my Rails development? Should I expect poor > Rais’ tools support of Darcs compared to SVN? I’ve already noticed > RadRails tightly integrates SVN, and the large amount of > online/offline (the Agile book) discussing SVN with Rails, while Darcs > > - Rails only yields a single - good but short and very basic - blog > post. > > That said, I found SVN itself to be an overkill and less suitable for > my zen of development, and would like to stick to Darcs also for Rails > if the cost isn’t too high. An interesting discussion on this can be found here: [http://drupal.org/node/16631](http://drupal.org/node/16631) HTH, Peter ---
**Author:** ![alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/a4c791/32.png) [@alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alder)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2006, 11:53am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scm-for-a-rails-project-darcs-or-subversion/58295/3 "2006-04-20T11:53:26Z")
Peter S. wrote: > > Is there a technical reason for this dominance? Should I avoid Darcs > > An interesting discussion on this can be found here: > > [http://drupal.org/node/16631](http://drupal.org/node/16631) > btw. a nice comparison: [http://migo.sixbit.org/papers/Revision\_Control\_Systems/all-in-one.html](http://migo.sixbit.org/papers/Revision_Control_Systems/all-in-one.html) HTH, Peter ---
**Author:** ![alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/a4c791/32.png) [@alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alder)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2006, 12:33pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scm-for-a-rails-project-darcs-or-subversion/58295/4 "2006-04-20T12:33:31Z")
On 20 Apr 2006, at 11:53, David M. wrote: > There’s nothing stopping you using Darcs if that’s what you really > want to use. > > However, as you’ve noticed the “standard” is Subversion. RadRails > supports it; Capistrano requires it (as far as I’m aware), and is > magic for deployment. [1] Is an interesting read. I tend to use darcs for personal projects and svn where I have to. I’ve used Capistrano just fine [2] & [3] with either and TextMate has bundles for Subversion and Darcs (though I tend to use the command line anyway). I don’t see any reason not to use whichever one you want as appropriate, heck I’ve even heard of people using darcs locally on a project that used svn by setting up the appropriate boringfile / svn:ignore properties and being careful about how they did their commits. Chris [1] [http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2006/01/27/darcs-for-rails-users](http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2006/01/27/darcs-for-rails-users) [2] [Parked at Loopia](http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2006/02/03/darcs-and-switchtower-) not-working [3] [Parked at Loopia](http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2006/02/21/darcs-and-switchtower-) not-co-operating-part-2 ---
**Author:** ![alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/a4c791/32.png) [@alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alder)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2006, 11:56am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scm-for-a-rails-project-darcs-or-subversion/58295/5 "2006-04-20T11:56:27Z")
There’s nothing stopping you using Darcs if that’s what you really want to use. However, as you’ve noticed the “standard” is Subversion. RadRails supports it; Capistrano requires it (as far as I’m aware), and is magic for deployment. Until my Subversion server was available, I used gmail as a repository. It worked fine; I had lots of tar.rzip files sitting around, but I could “roll back”, “tag” and “branch” as I saw fit. I couldn’t use Capistrano (then Switchtower) to deploy, but uptime wasn’t a big concern for me so it just meant a bit of manual work to get things done. I use Eclipse, but not RadRails, so didn’t miss Subversion from that perspective. The real questions are “How much do _you_ like Darcs? How much manual work are _you_ prepared to put up with in order to use it? How tough would it be for _you_ to switch to Subversion?”, and obviously none of us can answer those for you. Regards Dave M. ---
**Author:** ![alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/a4c791/32.png) [@alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alder)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2006, 4:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scm-for-a-rails-project-darcs-or-subversion/58295/6 "2006-04-20T16:15:55Z")
On 4/20/06, Chris McGrath [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > (…) > [1] Is an interesting read. > (…) > [1] [http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2006/01/27/darcs-for-rails-users](http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2006/01/27/darcs-for-rails-users) Yes, it is. It’s also the only text I manged to find about using Darcs with Rails. There are a few others, discussing deployment issues with Darcs compared to smoother operation with SVN. So not very encouraging. The Rails wiki has several detailed treatments of SVN Rails development and deployment. Many other texts exist, some going into quite a bit of detail, like for example [1]. With so little information available online (and afai could determine: also offline), I had to try to get a sense of how many developers actually use Darcs to manage their Rails code, and a rough estimate of the overhead it incurs compared to the better-supported SVN, assuming I don’t use RadRails and probably won’t need SwitchTower or Capistrano. -Alder [1] [http://blog.teksol.info/articles/2006/03/09/subversion-primer-for-rails-projects](http://blog.teksol.info/articles/2006/03/09/subversion-primer-for-rails-projects) ---
**Author:** ![alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/a4c791/32.png) [@alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alder)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2006, 6:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scm-for-a-rails-project-darcs-or-subversion/58295/7 "2006-04-20T18:13:03Z")
On 20 Apr 2006, at 16:15, Alder G. wrote: > On 4/20/06, Chris McGrath [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > > > (…) > > [1] Is an interesting read. > > (…) > > [1] [Parked at Loopia](http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2006/01/27/darcs-for-rails-users) > > Yes, it is. It’s also the only text I manged to find about using Darcs > with Rails. There are a few others, discussing deployment issues with > Darcs compared to smoother operation with SVN. So not very > encouraging. Different from the problems on the other articles I mentioned? If so can you give me URLs as quick google didn’t turn up much for me. > The Rails wiki has several detailed treatments of SVN Rails > development and deployment. Many other texts exist, some going into > quite a bit of detail, like for example [1]. That’s a nice article, and could be translated to darcs, which I’d do if I had more time. > With so little information available online (and afai could determine: > also offline), I had to try to get a sense of how many developers > actually use Darcs to manage their Rails code, and a rough estimate of > the overhead it incurs compared to the better-supported SVN, assuming > I don’t use RadRails and probably won’t need SwitchTower or > Capistrano. I know a few who do, but most run svn, especially if they have public code. Guess it’s whatever you feel most comfortable with. I’m not sure what you mean by overhead mind you. If you’re deploying to unix I’d _really_ _really_ recommend checking out Capistrano, I can’t imagine using anything else now! Cheers, Chris ---
**Author:** ![alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/a4c791/32.png) [@alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alder)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2006, 6:56pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scm-for-a-rails-project-darcs-or-subversion/58295/8 "2006-04-20T18:56:12Z")
On 4/20/06, Chris McGrath [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > > with Rails. There are a few others, discussing deployment issues with > > Darcs compared to smoother operation with SVN. So not very > > encouraging. > > Different from the problems on the other articles I mentioned? If so > can you give me URLs as quick google didn’t turn up much for me. Actually I was refering to the same articles you quoted: one short introduction (well, more like a teaser :), and two troubleshooting posts. > > The Rails wiki has several detailed treatments of SVN Rails > > development and deployment. Many other texts exist, some going into > > quite a bit of detail, like for example [1]. > > That’s a nice article, and could be translated to darcs, which I’d do > if I had more time. Yeah, knowing all the gotchas in advance would be nice. Maybe I’ll find the time to write it after I experience all of them myself 🙂 > > With so little information available online (and afai could determine: > > also offline), I had to try to get a sense of how many developers > > actually use Darcs to manage their Rails code, and a rough estimate of > > the overhead it incurs compared to the better-supported SVN, assuming > > I don’t use RadRails and probably won’t need SwitchTower or > > Capistrano. > > I know a few who do, but most run svn, especially if they have public > code. Guess it’s whatever you feel most comfortable with. I’m not > sure what you mean by overhead mind you. Not sure either 🙂 I understand Rails on principle (MVC, basic concepts and MO), but actually developing a complex Rails application is still a mystery for me. I figured if everyone is flocking to SVN (when we all know how much simpler and subtly powerful Darcs is 😉 there must be a good reason… > If you’re deploying to unix I’d _really_ _really_ recommend checking > out Capistrano, I can’t imagine using anything else now! Sounds like I really need to check it out 🙂 (deploying to a Debian Stable server). > Cheers, > > Chris Thanks a lot, Chris. -Alder ---
**Author:** ![alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/a4c791/32.png) [@alder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alder)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2006, 10:18am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scm-for-a-rails-project-darcs-or-subversion/58295/9 "2006-04-21T10:18:43Z")
On 20 Apr 2006, at 18:53, Alder G. wrote: > > > The Rails wiki has several detailed treatments of SVN Rails > > > development and deployment. Many other texts exist, some going into > > > quite a bit of detail, like for example [1]. > > > > That’s a nice article, and could be translated to darcs, which I’d do > > if I had more time. > > Yeah, knowing all the gotchas in advance would be nice. Maybe I’ll > find the time to write it after I experience all of them myself 🙂 I didn’t have any problems other than the ones mentioned, and those articles were what got me to try darcs so I avoided them :). The main issue i’ve found using darcs is how to handle the case where others would use svn:externals. I shy away from them anyway, and for vendor/rails use tasks similar to this one on railsweenie [1], which I’ve blogged about here [2]. I don’t actually like the way my task works at the moment but it should give you the idea. What I’ve started doing with other plugins (which use svn in general with a few .zips) is checking them out to ~/dev/rails\_plugins/ \ and then using svn export ~/dev/rails\_plugins/ \ ~/dev/my\_app/vendor/\. I then record this in darcs with something like darcs record -alm "[PLUGIN\_NAME] - r123 - added". I do this manually at the moment but it’s crying out to be raked up. I’ve got every plugin I think I’ll need locally, which means I can create new or test apps without needing to be connected to the net. Another rake task crying out to be written is one that svn up’s all those dirs to keep me up to date. It would be great if you found the time to do the writeup, more people should behold the power of the darcside on their source \ > Not sure either 🙂 I understand Rails on principle (MVC, basic > concepts and MO), but actually developing a complex Rails application > is still a mystery for me. I figured if everyone is flocking to SVN > (when we all know how much simpler and subtly powerful Darcs is 😉 > there must be a good reason… I think simply because svn has a lower barrier to entry and wider usage, and it’s how you get the rails source. I much prefer how darcs works, especially given that one of my tasks pretty soon will be to help merge a branch and trunk in an svn repo that diverged over 1000 revisions ago ☹ I’m still finding my feet with darcs somewhat, and trying to figure out the best way of going about recording patches. At the moment I’m going for the record as often as possible approach, as well as this I should probably be putting useful tags in my commit messages to making pulling and pushing specific bits of functionality easier. On my “I want a pony” list is a rails app that you could tell about your darcs repos that would query them and allow you to drag and drop patches between one and the other. I haven’t really needed anything like that yet but it’d just be cool 🙂 > > If you’re deploying to unix I’d _really_ _really_ recommend checking > > out Capistrano, I can’t imagine using anything else now! > > Sounds like I really need to check it out 🙂 (deploying to a Debian > Stable server). I deploy to debian stable on my VPS using runit rather than spinner / spawner / reaper [3] and have used Capistrano with both darcs and svn. For darcs, I push to a dir readable by my www user (which I should put in a before\_deploy task thinking about it), have set :repository, ‘/path/to/readable/dir’ in config/deploy.rb and Capistrano gets it from there when it’s doing it’s stuff on the remote machine. Capistrano shells out to darcs get so you can put any darcs valid repo in there. Cheers, Chris [1] [http://rails.techno-weenie.net/tip/2006/2/7/](http://rails.techno-weenie.net/tip/2006/2/7/) deploy\_your\_apps\_on\_edge\_rails [2] [http://outside-thoughts.octopod.info/articles/2006/03/14/keeping-](http://outside-thoughts.octopod.info/articles/2006/03/14/keeping-) your-apps-on-the-edge-without-using-svn-externals [3] [http://outside-thoughts.octopod.info/articles/2006/03/18/](http://outside-thoughts.octopod.info/articles/2006/03/18/) switching-to-runit-from-spinner-spawner-reaper