What was it? I used darcs quite a bit back when I used to write more haskell, but have lost touch over the last decade or so. What happened? I was always under the impression that one of the things that set darcs apart was that it had a theoretical basis. Did something go wrong with that?
Darcs has the problem of exponential merges[0], where certain merges that would have a lot of conflicts takes an exponential amount of time (based on number of conflicts), which in practice can render certain patchsets unmergable.
The authors of Pijul[1] found a solution for the exponential merge problem, and from what I've heard there have been discussions that darcs might in the future switch to Pijul's algorithm.
My mental model is that cherry-picks are like a copy by-value of one or more patches. A merge is a copy by-reference of a specific series of patches.
It just so happens that what I usually want in practice is to make copies by-value. There are other integration workflows that make copies by-reference with dedicated merge commits. But my team's most common use case for long-lived branches is to track bugfixes for deployment to remote hardware separately from mainline development. So, by-value copies of small changes is much more common.
