[darcs-users] darcsweb 0.12 and some questions

[David Roundy]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 10:33:45PM -0300, Alberto Bertogli wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> I just wanted to let you know that I've tagged darcsweb 0.12. You can get
> it with "darcs get http://auriga.wearlab.de/~alb/repos/darcsweb".
> 
> It includes several changes and fixes since the last tag; the most
> important are:
> 
>  * Shade and zebra style for annotate.
>  * Use real tree if there's no pristine directory.
>  * Include the list of changed files in the RSS description.
>  * More verbose annotate sidebar (thanks to Max Battcher).
>  * Implement "multidir" configuration entries for automatic configuration
>      where there are several repositories in a single directory.
> 
> Fixes include some HTML and XML generation (thanks to Alexandre Rossi) and
> showing empty repos (thanks to Michal Sojka).
> 
> I'm thinking about adding a list on the darcsweb's site
> (http://users.auriga.wearlab.de/~alb/darcsweb/) to places that use it, so
> people can see what it looks like; so if you do and don't mind appearing
> on the list drop me an email or something =)
> 
> As usual, please let me know if you have any question or suggestions about
> it.
> 
> 
> I also have a couple of questions: first of all, I've been wondering if
> anyone thinks a "heavy-duty darcsweb" is needed for sites with high
> traffic and/or several repos (like kernel.org or something like that). I
> don't know if there are any of those, where the darcsweb overhead of
> calling darcs for every visit is too much.
> 
> The second question is about configuration: let's imagine that you have 20
> repositories in a single directory, so you use a multidir entry in
> darcsweb to avoid configuring all by hand, but you would also like to have
> a different description for each one: would it be
> clean/nice/polite/appropiate to put it under _darcs/prefs/description, or
> maybe create _darcs/darcsweb/description? Or is it better to do it in a
> different way?

As Jonathon suggested, I think using motd would be nice, then the same
message would be available when pulling or browsing on the web.  On the
other hand, you might want a long description on the web that you don't
want to see when pulling.  Once someone's pulling darcs, they don't need to
see that "darcs is a revision control system", for example, but might want
to see a message saying "this is the unstable branch of darcs".

> What is the recommended policy regarding the use of the _darcs directory
> for "third-party" applications like darcsweb?

I think I might prefer something like _darcs/third_party/darcsweb/.  This
would keep the namespace a bit clearer if there end up being many
third-party apps that want to store stuff in _darcs.

Sticking things in _darcs/prefs isn't too bad, as that entire directory is
intended to be user-editable, which means that a misconfiguration there
shouldn't cause darcs to fail.  But it could cause darcs to behave
unexpectedly, which is why I think I'd prefer not to have random stuff
being stuck in _darcs/prefs/.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net