[darcs-users] new version of trac-darcs plugin

[Lele Gaifax]

Eric Y. Kow wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I just thought you (Sreeram and Lele) might appreciate some user
> feedback.  

Sure, as usual, thanks!

> I have succesfully upgraded trac.loria.fr to trac-darcs 0.4
> today.  There were some minor hiccups (for example, you have svn
> update trac), so in case it helps anybody, I have noted my upgrade
> steps on the wiki.
> 
> http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/TracOnDarcs/UpgradingTo0%2e4
> 
> Notes:
> 
> 1. While I am grateful to have timeline and browse source working
>    again, I do notice that clicking on ChangeSets is very very
>    slow.  I understand that this isn't trac-darcs's fault, but
>    darcs annotate.  But I'm also wondering: is it really neccesary to
>    use darcs annotate output to display the contents of a changeset?

Eh, it's a shame that darcs does not provide a more efficient way of 
obtaining the content of a past revision of a file. Up to 0.3, 
trac-darcs did a "darcs diff -u -p some patch | patch pristine" to get 
there, slightly faster than the current approach of parsing its annotate 
output, but suffering of serious other problems...

Darcs should definitely grows a "cat" command, ala "svn cat". Given that 
its annotate command is already able to produce the whole content, even 
if in a strange and difficult format, it shouldn't be very difficult for 
an haskeller to implement the simpler output. I won't say how much I'd 
like to be able to do that...

> 2. On this page, http://trac.loria.fr/projects/admindt/timeline
>    Sometimes I get
>    ---- 
>    Repository checkins event provider (ChangesetModule) failed:
>    TracError: Unsupported version control system "darcs"
>    ----
>    and sometimes it works fine.

Uhm, I cannot really say nothing on this...

> 3. On this page, http://trac.loria.fr/projects/hylores/browser
>    I get a nasty Internal Error.

See below.

> 4. Similarly, on this page, 
>    http://trac.loria.fr/projects/curt/changeset/44
>    I get
>    UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode bytes in position
>    24-26: invalid data
> 
> I guess I'll file the last 3 as tickets on the trac site.  Thanks for
> all your work on this!

Good! ;-)

I have been hit by the same problems with one of my repos, and I agree 
this is currently the bigger problem I had with the new version: 
encodings :-( To the worst, I have not a clear idea on a possible 
workaround.

Both "darcs changes" and "darcs annotate" suffer the same problem, being 
darcs so encoding agnostic. It should be possible to enforce some kind 
of policy on "metadata" encoding (author and patchname comes to mind). I 
was able to minimize the hassle on 0.3 using (or not using) the 
DONT_ESCAPE_8BIT env var, but that clearly is honored only by "darcs 
changes", while "darcs annotate" emits bad XML in any case.

I'm very open to any suggestion on how to fix the problem!

bye, lele.