[darcs-users] Synchronizing repos with unison

[Jamie Webb]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 07:42:21PM +0100, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> >> The golden rule is to always sync the entire _darcs directory in
> >> one direction.  If you've pulled different patches into the two
> >> copies of the repo and then try to merge them, you'll probably end
> >> up with corruption. Apart from that, it should be fine.
> 
> > This makes sense, thanks for your answer. I will update the wiki  
> > along these lines.
> 
> Please don't.  (I'm the author of the current wording.)

But Unison is basically unusable unless you sync the _darcs directory.

You end up with two possibilities: a) you darcs pull first, but now
Unison sees modifications in both repos, so it'll be painful to merge
unrecorded changes; or b) you use Unison first, and now Darcs will see
huge conflicts with changes that appear recorded in one repo but not
the other.

It's fair enough to put a warning in about Unison, because it
certainly can screw things up (but not too easily, because if both
repos have been modifed, Unison will likely give you a hint by
prompting you to merge inventory or pending), however suggesting
skipping the _darcs directory doesn't seem right.

And why on earth would you need to skip _darcs when using rsync or cp?

-- Jamie Webb