[darcs-users] Re: [darcs] pull is silent about conflicts

[Peter Simons]

Aggelos Economopoulos writes:

 >> > ii) 'give me a unified diff between two snapshots of the tree' preferably
 >> > without exporting them and running diff -Nur

 >> Added to the TODO list. My leaning would be to support this
 >> feature only between tagged versions, but I'm not sure what you
 >> would use it for, so I could certainly be convinced otherwise.

 > This would be very useful for exchanging code with people that
 > either don't use darcs or don't use any version control system at
 > all. [...]

I agree with Aggelos here. This feature would be very useful if you
want to export changes back to the author of a package (who doesn't
use darcs). It would be nice if darcs could generate "real diffs"
(meaning that you can feed them into patch(1)) with 'whatsnew' as
well, so that I do not necessarily need to 'record' my changes before
I can sent them off to someone.


 >> > iv) elimination of hardcoded directory paths in darcs_cgi - currently I
 >> > just apply a search-and-replace patch before building
 >> 
 >> Added to the TODO list.

Concerning paths et al: Would you be interested in an Autoconf script
for darcs, which allows to set all those paths on the command line?
Your script supports only "--prefix", but other paths might be useful
to set as well. Also, the configure script could better determine your
environment, e.g. path to the compiler, etc.

An a similar notion: I noticed that the Makefile does not seem to have
the full dependencies of the sources. Just saying "make" after pulling
new patches will not work most of the time because "make" doesn't know
what has to be re-built.

I could contribute a more sophisticated Autoconf/Make infrastructure
for the project, which fixes those problems, but I wonder whether
you're comfortable with such an environment unless you have created it
yourself. (I know that many people aren't.)

Peter