[darcs-users] not erasing changes?

[Zach]

On 31 Mar 2007 19:00:31 +0200, Albert Reiner <areiner at tph.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
>
> My understanding may be incorrect, but my mental model of how darcs
> works in this respect is that nothing bad happens either way:
>
> When you pull patches into your repo, they are applied to both the
> pristine cache (i.e., foo/_darcs/current) and your working tree (i.e.,
> foo/).  If some of your local changes are at odds with the pulled
> patches, you get conflicts and will be able to resolve them.  The only
> subtlety is that you may end up with a different set of conflicts in
> the pristine cache and in your working tree if you don't record your
> local changes before pulling, i.e., if pristine and working tree
> differ.

Hallo Albert,

Cool so there is always a backup copy of a given file. Right now I
have a remote repo I copied onto my local machine and I started making
patches (locally) but I realized it would be good to have a reference
copy in case I really screwed up something bad (such as server no
longer compiles or dumps core) and it would be good to have a pristine
copy of the server around. I manually did "cp -r" my darcs repo to
another directory name and was working in that copy and then going
back to my darcs repo dir and manually recording each patch but this
is a bit tedious. Know a better solution? Is there something like a
shell script that can scan my duplicate darcs dir and find out what
stuff I have changed by comparing it against my normal darcs dir and
then recording the changes and just prompting me for the description
patch info tags?

> In fact, in at least one of the repos I routinely exchange patches
> with I have non-recorded changes dating back to at least 2005.  If I
> recall correctly, however, darcs only informs you about conflicts in
> the cache, not in your working copy.

Ah.

> I am not aware of an option to pull only patches that do not introduce
> a conflict; if the effort of pulling is not too great, you might want
> to check whether `darcs pull --dry-run' will tell you about conflicts.

I will try that command option danke.

Mfg,
Zach