[darcs-users] Attaching lots of data to a patch

[Albert Reiner]

Hi,

is there any way of packaging a (potentially large) amount of data to
a patch in a meaningful way?

The situation is as follows: I have made some changes to some program,
and I have used some computer algebra system to derive the relations
that those changes rely on; the symbolic calculations are in some text
file of modest size, but in a more general situation one might have to
deal with large binaries - e.g., a Lisp core.

In my current understanding I have the following options:

- Throw away the file.  Not good.

- `darcs add` the file and keep it in the tree.  That is something I
  want to avoid: that file really is relevant only for that particular
  patch and nothing else.  It should not pollute my tree in eternity.

- `darcs add` the file, record, `darcs rollback`, record again, record
  the changes, mention the add-patch in the summary.  This works but
  requires three separate patches for what should be a single one.

- `darcs add` the file to a separate repo that is used only for this
  kind of stuff, and mention the other repo in the patch summary.
  That should work well but is against my sense of aesthetics.

- Include the file in the patch summary.  This works for a small text
  file, but for large files `darcs changes` becomes largely unusable.
  Also, what would I do for a binary?  Include the uu-encoded file in
  the summary?

Any other options?  How do people who know darcs handle that kind of
situation?

Ideally what I would like is an option to attach some arbitrary file -
say, a .tar.bz2 - to a patch when recording, and a way to extract that
file again from that patch at a later time.

Regards,

Albert.