[darcs-users] Darcs Spotlight Importer

[Jonathon Mah]

Hi all,

As a bit of a midweek project, I decided to try to write a Spotlight  
importer for darcs repositories. And so, for the Tiger users among us:

<http://homepage.mac.com/jmah/temp/darcs-importer.zip> (48kb,  
instructions included)
<http://homepage.mac.com/jmah/temp/darcs-importer.png> (108kb,  
gratuitous screenshot :))

(For the archive: The above is a temporary URL until I get my new  
site up. When I get around to it, you'll find it at <http:// 
www.playhaus.org/>.)

As the (above) indicates, I'll put up a web site for it (along with  
other projects of mine) sometime soon, which will include access to  
its darcs repository. But enough logistics.

In a nutshell, the importer will expose a repository's patch logs,  
patch authors, and more to Spotlight. I needed to use a bit of  
hackery to get the OS to treat the _darcs directory as a single file  
(described in the Read Me file) -- seeing if I could get around this  
was one of my main motivations for building it. The only catch is  
that changes (i.e. records, etc.) aren't automatically picked up. You  
can set mdimport to run as a darcs posthook command as a reasonable  
workaround.

My inventory file parsing is a bit ugly, based on some quick  
experiments with small newly-created repositories. There may still be  
some cases that it doesn't handle.

I'm not convinced of the usefulness of such a plug-in, but it's at  
least nice knowing the data has been liberated somewhat from the  
confines of 'darcs changes'.

Give it a go, and let me know what you think.


Thanks for darcs!


Jonathon Mah
me at JonathonMah.com