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

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 08:10:26PM -0800, Kevin Smith wrote:\
> 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.

This is now fixed (soon to reach the darcs repo).  Writing a recursive
remove to replace the system "rm -rf" command has been on my TODO list for
ages, I just hadn't gotten arount to it.

> 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.

Well, I'd like to keep the number of external programs required to a
minimum (in either windows or unix).  In the case of wget, you could
install curl instead if that were easier.  But ideally we'd compile the
windows darcs executable with libcurl linked in statically (it's not that
big) so you'd need neither wget or curl.

To use ssh or scp, you'd need ssh installed (but I doubt anyone would want
to use ssh who doesn't already have it).

The other limitation of the windows version is that currently darcs has no
way to send mail from windows.

> 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.

I think that my recent improvements to the handling of binary files should
fix this problem.

.zip is already in binary.  I don't know what .class and .jar files are.
If they are like .o files in C, then I'll add them to boring, but they are
something you might actually want in the repo, I'll add them to binary.

> 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).

Currently darcs looks at the file contents during the record to guess if it
is binary, so there shouldn't be a problem (the slowness you saw when you
added large binary files was almost certainly because of the very poor
binary to hex conversion darcs had (until very recently).
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org