[darcs-users] Programmatic invocation (volunteers?)

David Roundy droundy at darcs.net
Wed Nov 2 12:30:20 UTC 2005


On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 12:06:16PM +0000, T.A.M. Counsell wrote:
> On Nov 2 2005, Olivier Lefevre wrote:
> >If you want to invoke darcs from another program (not in haskell), what 
> >are your options?
> 
> I'm considering the same question, as I'm in the midst of writting a gui 
> for darcs on Mac OSX. (see http://patchworks.counsell.org if you want to 
> play, but please bear in mind it is very very alpha).

I am definitely very interested in supporting external programs that
call/access darcs.  Unfortunately, there are too many darcs-related
projects that interest me, so I'm forced to prioritize, and don't expect
I'll be able to spend much time on this in the near future, but please let
us know about problems you run into.  And if some darcs contributor
(possibly a new one) is willing to step up and work on these issues, speak
up!

> So far I have found options:
> * Having my program be a user and just feed stuff to darcs using stdout
> and reading stdin. This is complicated because darcs is not 100%
> consistent in the way it prompts users. I'm thinking about submitting a
> patch to help rectify this.

This is definitely a useful goal.  We've had some ideas how to make darcs
easier to call in this manner.  Even if we introduce a C api, we'd still
like programs to be able to call darcs usefully, to allow for scripting,
etc.

So if you can point out inconsistencies as you find them, or suggest
improvements, that would be great.  (Best would be if a particular
haskeller were willing to work with you on this...)

> * Recompiling darcs so that it presents an C api. I have read a bit about
> doing this in the Haskel docs, and it looks tempermental.

This has long been a desired feature, and mostly has been waiting on a
user.  Darcs has too broad a feature range to export all of them in a sane
API, so this has been waiting on someone willing to work with us to develop
a clean API.  Again, I don't have time to work on this myself, but perhaps
someone will volunteer.  My experience is that with a bit of care,
exporting haskell functions to C isn't bad.

I *will* make time to review and criticize any proposed API.  I should
perhaps also point out for any haskell newbies, that I enjoy helping new
haskellers with their coding... the only catch being that I'm hoping to
soon (once 1.0.4 is released) go into seclusion to focus on conflict
handling.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net




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