[darcs-users] Initial impressions of darcs

[Martin Pool]

On 20 Aug 2004, Andrew Pimlott <andrew at pimlott.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 04:27:39PM +1000, Martin Pool wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Use a one-way synchronizer on your precious source code?  You're brave!
> I think you really want a push+pull, ie a bidirectional sync at the
> patch level (not the file level).

Right, so it would perhaps be safer and more efficient to do a kind of
"foreach dir {darcs pull -av}", to make a local mirror of your server.
My point is just that having a read-only replica is not so hard to do
with darcs.

> AFAICT, an archive is just a collection of repositories.  I like darcs
> because it leaves out these marginally useful entities.  It seems that
> you'd get the value of mirrored archives in darcs by having a directory
> whose subdirs are repos belonging to the "archive", and a script that
> does a push+pull on every repo.

That's correct.  Similarly, arch has quite a lot of concepts and
commands to do with naming branches.  But the branch already has a
unique location defined by the host and directory, so why not just use
that, as Darcs does?

The answer may be that if you really have an enormous project with
many checkouts and developers and branches then you need something
more formal.  Or maybe you want the psychological comfort.  But I'm
not sure it buys much more than just having a systematic directory
layout.

The big thing Arch can do that darcs cannot is tell you the provenance
of a patch.  (I understand that this is missing from bk as well.)
Arch will let you see which branches a patch has moved through before
ending up in a particular version.  Again, this might be useful for
large projects, but it does tend to introduce clutter.

-- 
Martin 
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