[darcs-users] darcs on MS Windows (was: internal error)

Kevin Smith yarcs at qualitycode.com
Sat Dec 6 04:10:26 UTC 2003


Gour wrote:
> On http://www.atmarama.org/repos/darcs-win32.tar.gz you can download yesterday's
> compiled version of darcs (it's compiled with -prof option) and so far, it
> works very smoothly - great improvement!

Excellent! Thanks!

I played around with it a bit at work, on a box without Cygwin 
installed, and had mostly acceptable results. Some notes:

1. It relies on an external 'wget' command to get via http, and there 
isn't one on my Windows box. I can live without it, or can probably find 
a copy of wget that will work.

2. It relies on an external 'rm' command, which surprised me at first. 
Then I realized it might be for recursive directory deletes. Since I 
have no rm command, it's leaving something undeleted.

If there is an easy way to get a list of all the external commands used 
by darcs, it would be helpful. It would be one important piece of a 
document describing limitations of the MS Windows version.

3. My first attempt at an initial checkin of my work project failed 
because I ran out of memory. This happened to me on a home project also, 
where it had tried to add large binary file(s). In this case, it's a 
java project, so I had to add boring extensions of .class, .jar, and 
.zip. After that, the record succeeded.

Beyond adding these extensions to the default boring file, I think darcs 
really needs some extra protection against this common problem. Perhaps 
it should warn you any time you attempt to add a file larger than a 
certain size (100k? 1 meg?). Or maybe only if you are doing a recursive 
add, since you're less likely to be paying close attention in that case.

It might also be nice to warn users if they are about to add a binary 
file as if it were text. I think it's ok for the 'add' operation to be 
somewhat slow, if you are adding large files. Better to discover 
problems then, than during the record (or even later).

The initial checkin is our first chance to impress our customer, and 
running out of memory isn't a great feature.

Aside from those issues, it seemed to work fine for the five minutes I 
tinkered with it. I changed a bunch of files, did a whatsnew summary, 
did a few records, and then a changes. It's definitely looking good.

Kevin





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