On 22 Feb 2013, at 15:37, Michael Hendricks <[email protected]> wrote:

> Here's another data point in favor of multiple branches inside a single 
> directory.  Many developers now work in IDEs or similar tools.  These tools 
> almost always have a notion of "project" which hardcodes a directory.  If 
> switching branches requires switching directories, one must have multiple 
> "projects" and synchronize configuration among them.
> 
> I rarely work in an IDE and darcs has caused me grief in this respect.  I can 
> imagine how IDE-centric developers would feel.

There's another situation that causes a similar problem. While I don't use an 
IDE (Sublime Text + Terminal.app is my "IDE"), I use Guard[1], which is a tool 
for automatically running commands during development. It has plugins for all 
sorts of things, the most common/obvious one being running tests, but also for 
things like compiling CoffeeScript to JavaScript, restarting development 
servers, running static site generators and so on.

Guard is unbelievable fundamental to my workflow, and I invest a lot of time in 
tweaking my Guard configs so I never have to run a command by hand. But 
switching directory breaks it. If I have to `darcs get` into another directory 
to create a branch, I have to open a new set of terminals in that folder, start 
a second Guard, and remember to throw it all away at the end. It's currently 
enough of an overhead that I just don't branch - I value (rightly or wrongly) 
the continuous development cycle more than the advantages of branching. But not 
being able to branch in a DVCS doesn't sit right with me. (Maybe I'm missing an 
obvious solution to this.)

Ash

[1] https://github.com/guard/guard

-- 
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http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashmoran

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