[darcs-users] the ongoing discussion of changing "_darcs" to ".darcs"

[Jamie Webb]

On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 04:56:27PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Attributions deliberately stripped.
> 
>     > The true fix here is not renaming _darcs/, its in stopping the
>     > current/ (pristine/) cache from appearing to be "real" files.
>     > David keeps talking about a mini-filesystem approach.  Of
>     > course an even quicker/simpler fix might be to start filename
>     > mungling, such as simply append ".darcs" to the end of every
>     > filename in current/.
> 
>     >> Or even "_darcs". :-)
> 
>     >> Seriously though, this does seem a nice simple solution,
>     >> even if it does break the repository format.
> 
> And not help anything at all.  File-ness is not determined by naming,
> unless you plan to rewrite all the _other_ tools you use besides darcs.

How often do you do something destructive to /every/ file in a repo?
Typically one selects files to act on either by directory or by file
extension, e.g. search and replace in all .c and .h files.  Certainly
IDEs pretty much universally ignore file extensions they don't
recognise.

Also, while this would break the local repository format, remote users
should be unaffected.

Having said that, a simpler solution still is for those users affected
by this to favour the style of putting the entire project in a
subdirectory of the repo, hence keeping _darcs out of the way. If John
Meacham's 'domains' extension makes it in, this should probably become
recommended practice anyway.

-- Jamie Webb