[darcs-users] Initial impressions of darcs
Martin Pool
mbp at sourcefrog.net
Thu Aug 19 06:27:39 UTC 2004
On 18 Aug 2004, Dustin Sallings <dustin at spy.net> wrote:
>
> On Aug 18, 2004, at 6:16, Kevin Smith wrote:
>
> >Personally, I view this as the biggest problem with darcs. At a
> >minimum, I want the SCM to manage the collection of branches (darcs
> >does not). I really *don't* want a whole new repository for each
> >branch. After using darcs successfully for several months, I have now
> >stopped, due primarily[1] to that issue.
>
> I'm still not sure how I feel about this. I use both darcs and arch
> (tla). I think I generally like using darcs more, but arch has a
> pretty big advantage for me in the separation of project from
> repository. It's all about having replicas for me. Every time I start
> a darcs project, I have to do some setup to get that project replicated
> so that each of the four computers I use regularly has a copy. In
> arch, I typically put all of my projects in a single ``archive,'' which
> is already replicated so pretty much done.
If your central machine is a.foo.net, then tla lets you automatically
have a read-only mirror of the A archive on all your laptops. So you
can start a branch from any project that's stored on A, even when
you're disconnected.
I think you could get close to that by just rsyncing a.foo.net:darcs/
onto each of your laptops each time you're connected. You now have a
replica that you should treat as read-only. You can get from that
replica to create branches at will. I don't see any advantage to
doing read-only replicas in darcs rather than through just copying.
I did something similar recently that made me very happy with darcs: I
got a branch from a backup when the "real" server for that branch was
unreachable. When it was reachable again, I could push my changes
back. This didn't leave any permanent record in the history.
> In arch, I can choose to have a branch not be automatically
> replicated, but in darcs, I cannot choose to have a branch be
> automatically replicated.
I think leaving replication to external tools shows a kind of elegant
simplicity.
--
Martin
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