[STORK] A fascinating revision control system

[Jeff Bone]

What?  Jbone posting tech bits?  Preposterous!  Unheard of!  Ummm...  
onwards.

Check this out, it hit sweetcode [1] this morning.  (If you're not 
familiar with sweetcode, think of it as a kind of low-volume, 
high-quality freshmeat.  Fascinating stuff, usually.)  Today, they 
posted about darc.  [2]  It's Yet Another Revision System, but this 
one's pretty interesting.  It's written in Haskell (huge plus or huge 
minus, depending on your POV) and uses some pretty advanced concepts.  
Haven't looked at the code, yet --- Haskell can be beautiful and 
literate or nigh unreadable, depending.  Code written by physicists 
tends toward the latter, IME. ;-)

 From the blurb:

"Darcs is yet another revision control system, but its "theory of 
patches" ("I have looked at patches as being analogous to the operators 
of quantum mechanics," says the author, a physicist) makes it at once 
much simpler and significantly more capable than most other such 
systems. See also monotone [3] (submitted by Darius Bacon), a 
crypto-centric, decentralized version control system which uses NNTP as 
a transport."

Fun stuff.  Now, if they'd just push this idea to the logical 
conclusion:  integrated, implicit versioning in the filesystem couple 
with directory-based filesystem indirection and HTTP access generating 
and fed by RSS... ;-)

Fyi,

jb

[1] http://www.sweetcode.org/
[2] http://abridgegame.org/darcs/
[3] http://www.venge.net/monotone/