[darcs-users] rename "_darcs" to ".darcs" ?

David Roundy droundy at abridgegame.org
Tue Aug 10 10:23:57 UTC 2004


On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 08:56:42AM -0300, Zooko Journeyman wrote:
> If "_darcs" were named ".darcs" then the normal Unix "hidden files" 
> feature would hide it from certain commands.
> 
> For example, I could do "grep -r fixme *", and the grep command would 
> not look into the ".darcs" directory.  Currently I have to do "grep -r 
> fixme * | grep -v _darcs", or else "mv _darcs .darcs ; grep -r fixme * 
> ; mv .darcs _darcs".
> 
> In addition to the convenience of that, it would also help Unix users 
> understand the intent -- if they look in a directory and see a 
> directory named ".darcs", they immediately know that it is a directory 
> for the use of the "darcs" tool and that they can ignore it when 
> dealing with their own files.
> 
> It would also give them a nice warm fuzzy feeling that darcs was 
> playing along with time-honored conventions instead of changing things 
> arbitrarily.

When I started on darcs, I debated this (with myself, obviously there
weren't any other darcs users), and wasn't really comfortable with .darcs
for a couple of reasons.

One is that it is *not* a small directory, and I didn't particularly like
the idea of hiding a directory that could run into the gigabytes.  True,
there are a lot of programs that create large hidden directories, but I
don't know of any that create them anywhere but in the home directory.
Actually, I have seen a few (usually storing thumbnails), but I've always
been annoyed with them.

Also, it is nice to be able to see that a directory is under darcs
control, and the presence of a visible darcs directory there is a
reasonable way to indicate that.  This is less important now that you can
run darcs in subdirectories of a repository (at one time this was a wild
new feature).

As far as time-honored conventions go, I'm not aware of any time-honored
conventions suggesting the creation of .files anywhere but in the home
directory, and certainly cvs creates CVS directories all over the place.
One doesn't want to mimic cvs in general, but I'm not aware of any
precedent for what you're suggesting (which could just be my ignorance).
There is also (although I hadn't thought of it) the apparent problems
windows users have with directories starting with a ".".

I don't particularly care for the "_" that starts darcs, but didn't like
the arch method of using shell metacharacters in its file and directory
names, and don't care for the idea of calling it just "darcs" (which would
create problems using it for darcs itself) or "DARCS" (because I don't like
capital letters).  So _darcs seemed like a reasonable name that wouldn't
conflict with any normal files or directories you might want to include in
your repository.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org




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