[darcs-users] annoyance with darcs convert . (darcs convert dot, aka the current directory)

[Dan Pascu]

On Sunday 22 February 2009, Thomas Hartman wrote:
> > cd foo # yep, that's foo/foo
>
> Well, it certainly confused me! I would say disallow, or at least
> warn. I'm now doubting whether I am in a darcs-2 repository after all,
> since I edited _darcs/format manually. I suppose I will need to
> convert and push again.
>
> I suppose another countermeasure that would have prevented this mess
> is if _darcs/format was in some
> kind of resistant-to-editing binary format.
>
> I don't really like either of these ideas because they seem like
> make-work though.
>
> After some reflection, I think the most intuitive thing to do might be
> to make convert a flag to darcs get, like
>
> darcs get --converto-to-darcs-2

I think this is exactly what we shouldn't do. This leaves the impression 
that everybody could convert by simply getting the repository, while in 
fact this will only lead to multiple converted repositories which are 
incompatible between them. Even more, a flag to get, will suggest to 
anyone that converting a repository is a simple matter that can be done 
on the fly as a side effect while getting a repository. This is blatantly 
false, as the conversion is not only a standalone operation, it is a very 
special and particular operation that has to be done only once in only 
one place.

If you have multiple sibling repositories, you should merge all the work 
into one of them, convert that, discard the others and re-get them.

> The word "convert" followed by that elaborate warning message confused
> me into thinking it was doing something destructive to the directory.

It depends on what you understand by destructive, but you can say that it 
does something "destructive" to the repository. It does convert it to a 
different format and the operation is not revertable, so the repository 
is changed in a way that cannot be undone.

-- 
Dan