[darcs-users] DARCS_GET_HTTP and pull

David Roundy droundy at darcs.net
Tue Nov 15 13:13:32 UTC 2005


On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 11:54:13PM +0100, Daniel Bnzli wrote:
> >> darcs pull
> >
> >darcs failed:  Can't understand repo format: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC  
> >"-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
> [...]
> >Can't understand repo format: <p>The requested URL /~dbuenzli/test/ 
> >_darcs/format was not found on this server.</p>
> 
> Indeed there is no such file in the repo, nor is such a file  
> mentionned in the DarcsRepo format described in the Appendix B of the  
> manual. Is that a bug ? I could also reproduce this with the darcs  
> repository (see below). I'm using version 1.0.4 on MacOS 10.4.3.

It's definitely a doc bug.  We added this file in 1.0.4, which will allow
backwards-compatible and forwards-compatible changes, but it didn't exist
with older darcs.  It's a file that describes the allowed format of the
repository, and actually even darcs 1.0.4 doesn't bother creating it, since
nonexistence is assumed to mean "this repo has just the old format", which
is how we maintain backward-compatibility with older repositories.

As we add new formatting features, there'll be options to add them to the
_darcs/format, which will affect how darcs reads and writes the
repository.  Some changes will allow older darcs to read, but not write to
the repository (e.g. a backwards-compatible hashed inventory), while others
(e.g. a new, more efficient, hunk patch format) will be neither readable
nor writeable by older darcs (but probably won't be in the "default"
format, at least not until they've been around a while.

The truly correct way to go about this (and I'll have to apologize--I
really ought to be the one to do it, but am not sure I'll have time) would
be to add literate docs to DarcsFormat.lhs, and then include that file in
darcs.lhs, perhaps after the inclusion of DarcsRepo.lhs.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net




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