[darcs-users] darcs repo code does not compile

[David Roundy]

On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 08:50:44AM +0200, Gour wrote:
> David Roundy (droundy at darcs.net) wrote:
> > This is also where the (now semiautogenerated) ChangeLog come from.
> 
> btw, where is this (generating of ChangeLog) described?
> 
> (so far, I use 'darcs changes' to accomplish ChangeLog and it looks I
> missed some messages in regards.)

I don't think it's described anywhere.  Tomasz wrote a custom code that
allows us to generate the changelog from files (located in
changelog.in/entries/) that contain entries like

match: name "subcommand infrastructure and .currently useless"
match: name "Add .query manifest. command"
> Add new "query manifest" command to list files and/or directories in
> repository.  Add some related infrastucture to support
> "subcommands". (Florian Weimer)

The first two lines are "--match" patterns for two patches.  If both of
those patches are present in the repository, then the bit with the >'s is
the actual changelog entry (which gets nicely formatted).  This has two
advantages.

One is that one can actually edit the changelog entry for typos, etc
(without generating more changelog entries).

Another is that one can tie the changelog entry to the patch(es) that made
the change, which means we can pull all the changelog entries from
darcs-unstable into darcs-stable, but only the relevant ones will appear in
the ChangeLog file.

A third (bonus!) advantage is that we avoid conflicts between patches
modifying the ChangeLog.  We used to store the ChangeLog in the repository,
but that was a nightmare, since we kept getting conflicting patches that
modified it, and we had to change it back and forth as patches moved from
unstable to stable.

The framework is still very new and somewhat experimental (and the code is
strictly tied to darcs--the 1.0.2 tag is hard-coded in, for example).  When
it's a bit more polished, I suppose we could generalize it and add it as a
tool for others to use.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net