[darcs-users] darcs 1.0.4 release

[David Roundy]

Hello darcs users,

I'm pleased to announce the release of darcs 1.0.4.  There are thirty
people who have contributed patches which have been incorporated into this
release, and more have helped by reporting bugs and good ideas on the
mailing lists and bug tracking system.  This release includes considerable
performance improvements and numerous bugfixes.

We are tentatively switching or bug tracking system to use Roundup instead
of Request Tracker.  Older bugs in the existing RT database can be accessed
at http://otherbugs.darcs.net, while http://bugs.darcs.net points to the
new (still empty database).  As always, bug reports should be emailed to
bugs at darcs.net.  Replies to existing bugs in RT will be directed to the RT
database, while replies to Roundup-tracked bugs will go to Roundup.  I
believe users will find the Roundup interface to be easier to use than the
old (and often-complained-about) RT tracker.

After this release, Tommy Pettersson will be taking over as maintainer of
the stable branch of darcs.

David


Some important changes in darcs 1.0.4:
=====================================

A longer listing of changes is available in the ChangeLog file.


* Highlights

Improved speed and memory usage. David Roundy and Ian Lynagh made a lot of
changes that greatly improved the way darcs reads and writes patches --
faster, smaller, better. This resulted in darcs not showing the total
number of patches during interactive selection, until you hit 'c'
(count). Kannan Goundan implemented clever pruning to make checking
specific files for recent changes much faster. Benedikt Schmidt implemented
a diffing algorithm which performs better on large files with many changes.

New --posthook option. Jason Dagit implemented a much requested feature,
the posthook option. It runs a given shell command if the darcs command
exits successfully, and is most useful when placed in the "defaults"
configuration file.

Manifest, and Query with subcommands. Another much requested feature is
listing which files and directories are currently added to darcs. Florian
Weimer wrote the Manifest command to do that, and also helped develop the
new infrastructure for subcommands, of which Manifest is the first.

Obliterate. There have been much debate on darcs' mailing lists about the
naming of Unpull, and David Roundy has now made Obliterate an alias for
Unpull.

Put. There's a new command, Put, symmetric with Get, to put a clone or
tagged version of the current repo somewhere. The command is still a bit
inefficient, so avoid it on very large repos. It's coded by Josef
Svenningsson.

Flags can now be given also after (and in between) the command arguments
(by David Roundy).

Git support. Juliusz Chroboczek put a lot of work into integrating git
repository support in darcs. This is still experimental, but very exciting.

Optimize can --modernize-patches and --reorder-patches. David Roundy
extended the Optimize command with new options to update patches to newer
formats (some very old formats have bugs) and to improve darcs' performance
on repos.


* Some important bugfixes (this is by no means a comprehensive list)

Repair works on partial repositories (by David Roundy).

Apply patch bundles with carriage returns added to their line endings (by
David Roundy).

Fixed incompatibility with somewhat older versions of libcurl (by Kannan
Goundan).


* Changed behaviors

Revert --all no longer asks for confirmation. This is the behavior of
Unrevert --all, Pull --all and Record --all, and is preferable when
scripting darcs. It was fixed by Jani Monoses.

Get displays a patch counter instead of dots, and so does Check and Repair
(by Matt Lavin).

Escaping of trailing CR:s (but not other trailing spaces) can now be
suppressed bye defining DARCS_DONT_ESCAPE_TRAILING_CR=1 (by Tommy
Pettersson).


* Notables

Peter Simons made some nice cleanups of the build system.

Andres Loeh made some nice cleanups of the LaTeX code in the manual.

Zooko changed darcs' web page to point new users to the precompiled darcs
binaries before giving them the source direction. Then they'll know about
this escape route before they start the (sometimes) hard journey of setting
up a system that can build darcs.

-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net