[darcs-users] Branching, again, in more detail

[Kevin Smith]

I'm still struggling with how I would do branching with darcs on an 
actual project. Specifically, I'm interested in going back to create a 
1.01 version when I am close to releasing 2.0. For simplicity, I will 
assume that the changes I make in 1.01 do not apply in the 2.0 tree, and 
that I do not want to pull anything from 2.0 back into 1.01.

In a conventional RCS, I would have a single repository that has the 
mainline (head) which is my work toward 2.0. Then, I would also have a 
branch for my 1.01 development, which forked at the 1.0 tag.

With darcs, I can see that I could create a new (empty) 1.01 repository, 
and get or pull the 1.0 tag into it from the old repository. I can work 
on 1.01 and 2.0 simultaneously, in different directories.

But the changes I make in 1.01 seem to be stuck in that repository. When 
I want to make a backup copy of "all my source code" for this project, I 
have to back up both repositories. If I publish my repository on the 
web, it would have two URL's. There doesn't seem to be any way to have a 
single repository (directory tree) that contains all the patches for 
both 1.01 and 2.0.

Oh, wait. I could create a tree and pull 1.01 from the new repository, 
then pull 1.0, and then 2.0 from the 2.0 repository. This new repository 
would have all three tags, so I could pull 1.0, 1.01, or 2.0 from it 
into yet ANOTHER repository at any time in the future.

But if I want to do more work on 1.01, I would have to repeat the whole 
process, except that I would start from the 1.01 tag this time.

That seems fairly inconvenient from a source code management standpoint. 
Is it just something to live with, or have I overlooked a solution? Or 
is is something that could be done within darcs but just hasn't been 
implemented yet?

Which reminds me: What is the undocumented 'inventories' directory for? 
At the moment, it merely seems to be there to annoy me by preventing me 
from doing inv<TAB> to see the current inventory file. :-/

Kevin