[darcs-users] Having difficulty pushing content to a remote repo

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2004 at 10:42:01PM -0700, Kevin Smith wrote:
> Samuel A. Falvo II wrote:
> >I'm attempting to update a remote repository, and I'm having difficulty.  
> >It appears that DARCS is *required* to be installed on the remote 
> >repository, which unfortunately, is simply not possible for me.
> 
> One of the reasons I like darcs is that a "server repository" only has 
> to be a visible directory tree, without needing any executable code on 
> the server. But darcs itself won't push files to such a plain repo, 
> which is why I use rsync:

Indeed, this is what I'd recommend doing, if you can't install darcs on the
server.

> >Can anyone please tell me how I can work around this?  If darcs uses scp 
> >to transfer data to the remote repository, why must it execute the darcs 
> >executable on the remote side?
> 
> I also wish darcs had the option to "push" new patches to a plain file 
> repository, using scp/rsync/sftp.

If I implemented a darcs push without having darcs installed on the server,
it wouldn't need to transfer the entire repo, but it would need to transfer
the entire contents of any modified files, and that is worse than rsync
would be.  And if it was implemented in an "easy" way, push would have to
transfer the entire contents of all modified files twice (once down and
once up).  So rsync is better.

The only advantage of a darcs "push" without darcs installed on the server
would be locking (so you could have multiple pushers), but I'm not even
sure how one would acheive locking securely with rsync etc (obviously it
would be different than creating a local "lock" file with O_CREAT).  I
think if you can't install darcs on your server, you're probably better of
just having a single developer uploading to the server.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org