[darcs-users] RE: Real-world darcs scenario (was: Win32 build of darcs again)

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 05:36:47PM +0000, libogen . wrote:
> In case I can't apply changes to remote repos, I could work on a local repo 
> on my PC and rsync over SSH to my hosting space's remote repo and then pull 
> it down to a local repo on my notebook. I'd then rsync-over-SSH again after 
> working on my notebook. As the repo is only used by me I think this is ok.

If you can get darcs installed on the server system (which may not be
easy), you could also log into the server and from there do a pull from
your notebook or PC rather than the rsync steps mentioned.  Of course, this
also requires running either an http server or ssh daemon on your notebook
and PC, which you might prefer to avoid.

> Actually there's a more basic problem. I mightn't be able to use any darcs 
> command that uses SSH as I think that darcs relies on an external SSH 
> client. To be more precise, the OpenSSH client used by Posix based 
> platforms(?) To this end I think that it would be helpful to, as David 
> wrote at the end of this mailing list posting ( 
> http://www.abridgegame.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2003/000175.html ), "bite 
> the bullet and set up support for a ~/.darcs configuration file" to support 
> external commands.
> 
> In this way for example, I could add to the configuration file, the correct 
> command line parameters to issue to PuTTY's plink.exe command line SSH 
> client (which has recently been ported to Unix).

It never occurred to me that ssh would be called anything but ssh! :) You
may have more trouble than anticipated, since darcs uses not only ssh, but
also scp.  Hopefully there is a nice way to make plink pretend it's scp?

> CVS uses a different method i.e. setting a Windows environment variable as 
> follows; "SET CVS_RSH=D:\path\to\Putty\Plink.exe". Plink also requires "SET 
> PLINK_PROTOCOL=ssh".

Hmmmm.  My leaning is towards the CVS-style method of configuring ssh, as
it's a bit simpler to code, and somehow seems a bit cleaner.  There is
already a support for a ~/.darcs/ directory which can be used to configure
user-specific defaults (I think it may be documented in the "setpref"
section).  But there isn't yet a file for configuring external commands,
except those which are configurable by a command-line flag.

I was recently playing with a DARCS_SENDMAIL environment variable, and it's
extremely easy to implement this sort of thing.  Probably I need to add a
manual section on darcs-specific (or simply darcs-understood) environment
variables.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org