[darcs-users] Darcs Community ChangeLog: 1.0.3 released

[Mark Stosberg]

( Although 1.0.3 has already been published, this provides more detail
about what's happened since the last release. )

The darcs project is pleased to announce the release of 1.0.3, the latest
stable release of this innovative source control management software. 

  http://www.darcs.net/

This Community ChangeLog describes updates to the darcs community since the
last release. We have big picture news, followed by the traditional detailed
list of changes to the software. 

Darcs development has continued to pick up steam since the last release.  Along
with the project growth came some important leadership delegation.  Author
David Roundy worked with Tomasz Zielonka and Ian Lynagh, as they picked up
responsibility for the Stable and Unstable branches respectively. David
continues to focus us work in a third 'conflicts' branch, where he is in the
middle of a project to make drastic performance improvements to the darcs
conflict commutation algorithm. 

The darcs wiki [1] has also undergone a transformation. Thanks to Shae Erisson,
David Roundy and others, the wiki is now conveniently hosted at darcs.net, and
features an update to the excellent MoinMoin [2] wiki software. 

 1. http://wiki.darcs.net/
 2. http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/

Soon we hope to implement improvements to our bug tracking system as well,
which a number of users have requested.

Since our last stable release, a momentous announcement was made in the source
control world: Linus would no longer be using BitKeeper to manage the massive
and high-profile Linux kernel project.  While Linus evaluated alternatives,
several potential replacements, darcs included, scrambled to create
enhancements to make their offerings more attractive. 

Soon Linus announced that he had written his own tool called 'git' as at least
an interim solution. While 'git' has great performance, it was not a complete
source control system. Julius Chroboczek, a darcs developer, rose to the
challenge, creating 'darcs-git'. His software extended darcs so it would work
directly with a git repo using darcs commands. 

 darcs-git tutorial: 
 http://www.mail-archive.com/darcs-users%40darcs.net/msg00059.html

 darcs-git source code:
 http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/repos/darcs-git/

The features of this branch of darcs are expected to be merged with the
official darcs code base in the near future.

Several performance improvements also appeared in darc's Unstable branch.
A stable release incorporating them is expected soon.

PHP users will be interested to know that a PHP-based clone of the darcs.cgi
repo browser has appeared. Details and source code are here:
  http://mbostrom.us/cowiki/23.html


Detailed code updates since the last release

This release brings over twenty enhancements from the previous stable
release.  Some highlights of new features and bug fixes are below. For
more detail, see 'darcs changes'. Some entries refer to bugs or wishlist
items tracked through our bug tracking system located at:
http://bugs.darcs.net/ 

New Features: 

  * unrevert accepts --all and --interactive options 
  
  * darcs tag can now accept the tag name on the command line (RT#143). 
  
  * unrecord and unpull have a more powerful interface similar to
    'darcs pull'. This allows for multiple patch selection.   

  * RT#245: Using --look-for-adds with 'whatsnew' implies
    --summary. This should save some typing for the common case. 
    
  * RT#231: darcs gives better feedback now if you try to record
    nonexistent files or directories. 
  
  * send accepts --sendmail-command that allows to customize the
    command used for sending patch bundles 

  * added support for displaying patches with pager when
    selecting patches 

  * new match type "exact" 

  * darcs.cgi now uses appropriate caching headers. This will
    make repeated calls to the same pages by cache-aware browsers much faste
    in some cases. It also means that darcs.cgi can be usefully combined with
    a cache-aware proxy for even better performance. 

  * more control over color and escaping in printed patches,
    alternative color scheme, escaping of trailing spaces 

  * darcs can now use nvi as a text editor without an awkward
    workaround.

  * Automatically add parent directories for darcs add. (RT#20)

  * Add helpful diagnostic message when there is a failure while pulling (RT#201)

Bug Fixes:

  * Fixed a usually harmless bug in darcs 1.0.2 that led to a confusing error
    message about an attempt to write a "buggy pending".

  * RT#396: error when specifying a removed file on the command line
    of darcs record.

  * RT#370: --tags work in unpull and unrecord 

  * fixed bug manifesting with failed createDirectory 

  * RT#266: Adding a non-existent dir and file gives the expected
    message now.

  * RT#10, a missed conflict resolution case. More accurately, we
    noticed at had been fixed some point. A regression test for it was added.

  * RT#305: Removed '--patch' from the 'changes', which conflicted
    with the new '--patches' option.

Internals:

  * darcs' ChangeLog is automatically generated from repo history
    and a database of ChangeLog entries 

  * Internals: RT#255, several welcome refactors were made to the test suite,
    including comprehensible shell test script output, improved portability,
    and easier maintenance. 

Further information:

 http://www.darcs.net/  







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