[darcs-users] partial checkout?

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 07:54:09PM -0800, Adam Megacz wrote:
> 
> Hrm, is there any major problem with implementing this feature?
> 
> http://www.abridgegame.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2004-March/001238.html

No, fundamentally there's no problem with implementing Kenn's suggestion.
In practice it would be a bit awkward to implement consistently across the
entire set of darcs commands.  I would lean towards implementing this idea
(at least at first) as a wrapper around darcs that allows you to call just
a subset of darcs commands, and without filepath arguments.  It's the
filepath arguments that would get scary, since you'd have to adjust them
for each repository, and probably would also want to limit which
repositories you call for each filepath.

> I also still don't see (after reading the thread) why you couldn't
> tell the repo that a certain directory was "modular", and hence any
> patches which spanned that directory (for example, moving a file
> beneath that directory to some part of the tree *not* beneath that
> directory) would have to be split into a seperate delete-and-add.

This would be possible, but very very awkward unless the notation of a
modular directory was simply advisory.  The problem would be that in order
to enforce modular repositories, there would need to be a new patch type
indicating that a modular repository is being created, otherwise you'd have
the possibility of other repos creating patches that cross the directory
boundary.  It's not just that you can't move between directories, but you
also need to keep users from recording any patch that modifies files on
each side of the barrier.

Kenn's idea linked to above is probably the nicest, and certainly the
simplest way to go.  But since I think that checking out just one
subdirectory from a repo is a bad idea, I'm not likely to work on
implementing such a solution.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org