[darcs-users] new to darcs

[Olivier Thauvin]

Le Vendredi 17 Mars 2006 02:21, Mark Greenbank a écrit :
> Hi,
>
> First of all, a big thank you to darcs -- I just finished research the
> various SCM systems and I find darcs the best. Now I'm converting all of
> our repos to darcs.
>
> I have one question, though (actually, probably just the first in a series
> over the next little while :) -- is there any way to embed keywords in a
> source file and have then replaced with things like tag, filename, version,
> etc.?

No, and this can't easilly be done if you think a bit about how darcs works:

- filename: yes this one can be introduce, but most of people will said it is 
useless (C can do this for you, perl also, and in all case you know the file 
you're writing on)

- date ? which date ? last patch ? patch have no order, meaning you can apply 
patch 1 and 3 to a repos while you have 1 2 3 in your home.
- revision, there is no revision in darcs, a "revision" is an accumulation of 
patch, maybe last tag, but a tag is just a special type of patch, we back the 
first problem.
- Author ? which one ? Author are set by patch, and again, last patch have is 
no sense.

All these values come from RCS having strict order in patchset, aka 1 < 2 < 3. 
These RCS choose to show last value. I agree that's nice, but if you like 
darcs because it allow to select change by change what will be your code 
instead CVS or subversion (for example), you should also agree this wonderful 
feature have a cost, this limitation is one. No because darcs is bad, simply 
because it is different.

Frankly, after some analyze, I prefer no keyword instead a fake that always 
lie (aka showing always same value because new patches are older than my last 
one).

I skip the troll about the usefulness about the CVS/svn 'Author' keyword, 
imagine one guy wrote 99% of code, another fix a small typo, and the field 
show the last author...
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/attachments/20060317/90e754b0/attachment.pgp