[darcs-users] Branching and the central repo

[Matthias Fischmann]

hi, i am struggling to believe that darcs doesn't have cvs-style
branches, but i think i am almost there.

[the setting] i want to have a central repository for a number of
   developers and anonymous users that contains all the development
   stages of a software project.  some of these stages obviously are
   conflicting with each other, and merging only makes sense along the
   tree branches.

[the cvs way] the global set of all patches are arranged in a tree, and
   although this global patch set resides in one repository, consistency
   is attempted along the branches only.

[the darcs way] a repository is a patch set without any internal
  structure beyond that naturally imposed on it by the patch algebra.
  this leaves us two options:

   a) tags following a suitable naming convention may be used to create
     the illusion of a tree structure.  (this is what should be done
     in cvs anyway, because the internal revision numbers are a little
     impractical useless.)  this leads to a very bizarre working copy
     in the central repo, but as long as nobody makes a mistake it'll
     be fine.

   b) the central repository is a growing directory containing
     overlapping repositories, each representing one branch.  for each
     new branch, a new repo is forked off the parent branch in a fresh
     sub-directory using 'darcs get' on the local file system.  which
     is not a space problem, because hard links are used to keep the
     disk usage near optimal.

[my questions]

 1. Is the b) the recommended way of doing it?  I think I could get
    used to it, although I think it's really bizarre.  (-:

 2. Is there anything wrong with option a)?  I am interested in its
    technical errors as well as questions of elegance and style.  (I
    am aware that 'darcs get' shouldn't be called there without an
    explicit tag name.)

 3. Is there any other way to do branches?


I am really starting to enjoy this.  (:



thanks a lot,
m.
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