[darcs-users] push, and how I used darcs (was: sugggestion on command naming)

[David Roundy]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 10:46:36AM -0800, Kevin Smith wrote:
> The best way for me to receive patches is to pull them from someone 
> else's publicly visible repo. If they prefer to email me the patch, 
> that's ok too. I look at it, and may apply it to my local repo as if I 
> had made the change myself. Those changes get published along with my 
> own, using rsync.

I hope these persons who email you patches do so with push? If so, you are
already using push precisely as you should be.  I'm just a bit uncertain
here because you say you apply it "as if I had made the change myself."
When you apply patches created with push, it is no different than if you
had run pull yourself to get them from a contributor's repository.

> Would my life improve if I used push somehow?

As Vadim suggested, you could potentially use push to more efficiently do
your backup or your upload to the server.  As the repo gets big, this could
be a significant speed enhancement, since I believe that rsync will always
have to run a checksum on every file in the repo history, which darcs
doesn't have to do.  On the other hand, rsync is pretty fast and *very*
easy, so it'll be a while before this is a compelling reason.

Another potential advancement you could get via push would be that if you
could push to the server via email (which requires being able to run
procmail and install darcs on the server), and if you have a slow test
suite, then if you use push to upload to the server you could have the
server run the test suite and reject the push if it fails.  This is the
main reason why I use push.

Even if you run the test suite on your workstation before uploading it,
this allows you to run the suite on two different computers with possibly
two different (or slightly different) tool chains, without slowing you down
any (since you don't need to wait for the server to finish the test.  For a
long time abridgegame.org ran ghc5, and this testing trick was how I found
out whenever I introduced and incompatibility with ghc5.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org