[darcs-users] BIG Mistake

[Tommy Pettersson]

On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 10:14:41AM -0500, Jorey Bump wrote:
> Is it safe to  delete the corresponding (and huge) patch file, now?

Yes. It is mainly left for debugging / crash recovery purposes,
but if it is a hard link and you later pull the same patch again
it can also be "reused" instead of being replaced with a
space-consuming copy. There are plans to make Pull create hard
links all by itself, and to give Optimize a --cleanup flag that
removes unused patch files automatically.

> could I have achieved the same thing by simply deleting 
> the large patch, removing the directory from working & current, and 
> deleting the corresponding line from _darcs/inventory? Once again, we're 
> assuming there are no dependencies.

This only works if the patch is the last one (at the top of the
inventory file). If the patch is not the last one, it _may_
work, and Check should be a valid test if it did or didn't. In
the general case this is very unlikely to work, though. Also, if
the repo has checkpoints after the removed patch, they must be
removed too.


-- 
Tommy Pettersson <ptp at lysator.liu.se>