[darcs-devel] Git-aware Darcs: a tutorial
Juliusz Chroboczek
Juliusz.Chroboczek at pps.jussieu.fr
Mon May 9 09:29:22 PDT 2005
0. What is Darcs-git
Darcs-git is a branch of Darcs that can work with Git repositories.
Darcs-git is deliberately Darcs, not Git. All commands either work in
the same way on Git repositories as on Darcs repositories, or they
fail. If you're a Darcs user, you'll like darcs-git. If you're a Git
user, you'll probably find it infuriating.
On the other hand, Darcs-git uses stock Git repositories; a Darcs
command either works as-is on a Git repository, or fails.
1. What you can expect
The following should work reasonably well on Git repositories:
darcs changes
darcs whatsnew
darcs pull
darcs send
darcs record
The following commands work, but have serious performance problems:
darcs diff
darcs changes with a file argument
The following commands should in principle work but haven't been tested:
darcs add
darcs remove
darcs dist
darcs trackdown
The following commands don't work because I'm lazy::
darcs push
darcs unrecord
darcs unpull
darcs amend-record
darcs annotate
darcs rollback
The following commands only work on native Darcs repositories, either
because they don't make sense on Git repositories, or because there
are perfectly good native Git tools to perform their function:
darcs initialize
darcs get/put
darcs check
darcs repair
darcs optimize
darcs mv
darcs replace
darcs resolve
darcs tag
darcs setpref
Remote Git repositories are not supported.
2. A tutorial
(0) Build darcs-git
$ darcs get --partial http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/repos/darcs-git
$ cd darcs-git
$ make darcs
$ make Context.hs
$ make darcs
$ cp darcs ~/bin/
(1) Get a copy of the Linux Git repository:
$ cd /usr/local/src
$ mkdir linux-2.6
$ cd linux-2.6
$ rsync -r rsync://rsync.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/torvalds/linux-2.6.git .git
$ curl http://rsync.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/torvalds/linux-2.6.git/HEAD > .git/HEAD
We still need to bring the cache and working directory into a state
that Darcs will be happy with. While this could in principle be done
with Darcs itself, it will be faster to do it with Git:
$ read-tree `cat .git/HEAD`
$ checkout-cache -a
$ update-cache --refresh
(2) Check what the friendly Linux hackers have been up to:
$ darcs changes | more
$ darcs changes -s | more
(3) Create a local clone of the Linux repository:
$ cd ..
$ mkdir linux-2.6-local
$ mkdir linux-2.6-local/.git
$ ln -s `pwd`/linux-2.6/.git/objects linux-2.6-local/.git
$ cp linux-2.6/.git/HEAD linux-2.6-local/.git
$ cd linux-2.6-local
$ read-tree `cat .git/HEAD`
$ checkout-cache -a
$ update-cache --refresh
(4) Commit some work
First, check that Darcs is happy with the new repository.
$ darcs whatsnew
This should take a few seconds at most; if it takes minutes instead,
try running ``update-cache --refresh''.
Okay, let's add myself to the list of Linux maintainers.
$ echo 'P: Juliusz Chroboczek' >> MAINTAINERS
Let's see if Darcs agrees.
$ darcs whatsnew -s
$ darcs whatsnew
Everything looks fine, let's record (commit) this patch.
$ darcs record -a
$ darcs changes | more
$ darcs changes -s | more
(5) Send it upstream
If Linus were using Darcs, we could just send him a Darcs patch, which
is a patch-like data structure that contains just enough context
information to allow Darcs to perform a history-sensitive merge:
$ darcs send ../linux-2.6
However, until Linus switches to Darcs, we're stuck with old-fashioned
patches.
$ darcs diff -u --patch='.' | mail bill at microsoft.com
Unfortunately, until I've spent some time optimising ``darcs diff'',
the above won't terminate on a repository the size of Linux'.
3. Caveats
There is little input validation. In particular, if you enter an
e-mail address that doesn't end in ``>'', Darcs will write a commit
that neither Git nor Darcs itself will be able to parse.
Darcs never updates the Git cache. If you perform many commits using
Darcs, you'll need to manually run ``update-cache --refresh''.
Darcs treats Git merges by reverse-engineering a Darcs merge (thanks
to David Roundy for outlining how that can be done). In practice,
this means that Darcs will collapse as soon as it sees a nontrivial
Git merge.
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