Common Lisp and darcs
darcs seems to be the RCS of choice for Common Lispers, for some reason. From my experience, if a package isn’t downloadable and ASDF-Installable from cliki.net, there is usually a darcs repository available. Unfortunately, ASDF-Install can’t install directly from a darcs repo.
Even more unfortunately, I wasn’t able to install darcs (or more specifically GHC) using MacPorts. However, there is a darcs client written in CL available, which works fine for getting code from darcs repositories. Typing (darcs:get-repo URL local-directory) fetches the latest version of the repository and puts it into the specified directory.
2007 seems to have been the year of the version control systems, in particular the distributed version control systems, such as Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar. Darcs seems not to have gotten as much attention, but seems to be an interesting use case for Haskell, in addition to Pugs (the Perl 6 compiler and interpreter).
It seems like only yesterday that we got Subversion, that was to save us from the horror of CVS. How did we ever manage without all these other version control systems?
“RCS of choice” seems too strong to me. Some Common Lispers use darcs, but some use git, some use mercurial, some use SVN, and some even use CVS.