[darcs-users] darcs patch: ./src/ByteStringUtils.hs: remove trailin... (and 64 more)

[Trent W. Buck]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> Petr Rockai writes:
>
>  > tagging the "clean" state is still perfectly possible.
>
> Yes.  In CVS or git I would suggest a system with both fixed tags and
> a "moving tag" which is named something like "recent clean state on
> trunk" (with the obvious semantics).  The moving tag of course always
> points at the most recent fixed tag.  This has been quite popular with
> XEmacs beta testers where we use it to tag "latest-beta".
>
> Unfortunately, I don't know whether Darcs tag semantics would support
> this usage, since I've not used them this way, and "help tag" doesn't
> show a "--delete" or "--force" option.

Darcs supports deleting tags (darcs obliterate or unrecord) as they are
ordinary patches.  It doesn't support "moving" tags, or what you might
call "aliases" that point to the most recent of a kind of tag.

TECHNICALLY the semantics you describe are possible, but only by leaving
a mess.  If you have fifty tags all called "stable" in the repository,
then "darcs get --tag clean" will use the latest one, based on the
ordering of the patches in the source repository.  As long as each
"clean" tag depends on its antecedent "clean" tag, this will do what you
want even after a "darcs optimize --reorder".

However, this will mean that "darcs changes", not to mention "darcs show
tags" will be bloated a whole lot.