[darcs-users] ANN: darcs-buildpackage

[John Goerzen]

Hello,

I am pleased to announce the first release of darcs-buildpackage, a
tool for Debian developers to simplify the use of Darcs repositories
for tracking changes to projects.

You may obtain it from:

 * darcs get --partial http://darcs.complete.org/darcs-buildpackage

 * .tar.gz and i386 .deb available from its temporary homepage at
   http://quux.org/devel/darcs-buildpackage

 * It will eventually be available in Debian sid

darcs-buildpackage is a suite of several tools:

 dbp-importdsc: Import an upstream version and a Debian version from
 a Debian source package, automatically detecting package and version
 information from the .dsc.

 dbp-importorig: Import an upstream tar.gz or directory.

 dbp-markdeb: Mark a working copy for future reference.

 darcs-buildpackage: Builds a Debian package based on information in
 the repository, checking out Debian and upstream versions as necessary.

 dbp-get: Checks out a source tree for a package into the current
 directory, referring to Darcs mirrors if necessary.

This toolset is modeled after my earlier work, tla-buildpackage.
That, in turn, is very loosely based upon the ideas in
cvs-buildpackage.

I'm particularly excited about dbp-get, which is a fairly nifty
feature that is really only possible with Darcs.

I will be converting all my tla-buildpackage repositories to
darcs-buildpackage over time and will be posting work on
http://darcs.complete.org/debian (not yet active) over time.

darcs-buildpackage is written in Haskell, in about half the code it
took to write tla-buildpackage (in Python).

There is a start of a manual; please read it in
/usr/share/doc/darcs-buildpackage to get a good idea of what is
possible.

-- John