[darcs-users] Tracking third-party software

[Sean E. Russell]

On Tuesday 17 February 2004 06:47, David Roundy wrote:
> Trying to use the darcs patch format outside of darcs itself doesn't really
> seem useful to me.  If you don't keep track of the precise version to which

Oh, heck... I can change your mind about that.

I have a project that I maintain primarily in darcs, but I also have to 
maintain it in somebody else's CVS tree (it is the XML parser for the Ruby 
language).  So, I do all of my development work in darcs, and occasionally 
cross-port it to the Ruby tree.

Right now, I just run diff across both trees when I want to merge them, but 
being able to dump a diff directly from darcs -- including comments -- would 
be pretty handy.  This is because there are a couple of files that I change 
in the CVS, and running diff across both trees right now destroys those 
changes; a darcs diff dump would preserve these changes when I patched the 
CVS tree.

To make matters worse, I also maintain the tree in a Subversion repository, 
which is its legacy repository, and from which I run the distribution 
scripts, so a single darcs diff could be applied to both secondary 
repositories; right now I run through the diff process on both.

So, it is definitely useful; the question is whether what I'm doing is common 
enough to make it useful enough to implement.  I was going to say "probably 
not", but a lot of traffic on this list is about discussions about 
cross-repository-architecture issues, like maintaining trees between darcs 
and CVS.

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