[darcs-users] Re: A couple of pre-newbie questions

[Tommy Pettersson]

On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 03:48:45PM +0100, Albert Reiner wrote:
> > Anyhow, if the context file is for a subrepo (a release of
> > some kind) 'darcs get' can use it to rebuild the repo from
> > the master repo, which contains all the necessary patches.
> 
> In that case the context would correspond to a tag, wouldn't it?

Yes.  I can think of three places where "contexts" appear:
in context files, in tag patches, and in patch bundles.


> > > - Is it correct that that method would create additional records
> > >   (i. e. I would have to record the current state of affairs before
> ...
> >                     Most people recommend to use other tools
> > for file tree syncing in these cases.  Maybe that is best
> > for floppies too.
> 
> I see.  Can one simply tar the directory up and untar it somewhere
> else, or are there things like the inode signatures that make problems

darcs only requires the files contents.  It can also compare
the change time of files in the pristine and working tree to
speed up the comparison done by whatsnew and record.

So it is possible to clone a darcs repo with 'cp -r' or tar.
However, files in _darcs/patches/ are not (yet) deleted
when they become obsoleted (by unrecord/unpull), so tar and
cp might bring along some unneded patch files.  To further
save space, everything in _darcs/current/ can be left out,
since it is a cache that can be rebuilt with 'darcs repair'.


-- 
Tommy Pettersson <ptp at lysator.liu.se>