[darcs-users] Darcs' Direction (from re: GHC and Darcs)

[Max Battcher]

Patrick Waugh wrote:
> But, when you make arrogant assumptions, like the above, you can kiss
> none darcs developers goodbye.  For your infomation, we read the web
> site from stem to stern several times, and "some of that information"
> is not adequate.  Hence my post.  So, if you want to live in denial to
> protect your ego, fine, but it is a fact coming from the source.

Yikes!  First of all: I AM NOT A DARCS DEVELOPER.  I'm just a happy user 
doing my best to try to help you based upon what little detail I've 
tried my best to glean from your emails.  I certainly meant no offense 
in my post, I certainly don't speak for the entire community and I 
believe you may have misconstrued some/most of my post and missed some 
of my offered advice, allow me refine and redact...  I'm sorry that you 
can't seem to find the information that you are looking for.

Your limitation of having a shared web server that will not allow you to 
install darcs is an unfortunate circumstance.  With older source control 
systems that becomes an immediate showstopper: CVS, SVN, and others 
require a central server where you can install a dedicated server 
software program.  With darcs it is more of an inconvenience than a show 
stopper and there are several ways to build a workflow around this... 
They just won't be as easy as if you were able to secure a central 
server that you had the ability to install darcs onto.

One suggestion: You might be best off, in the long run, at the very 
least investing in a virtual server where you have administrator rights 
or root access.  You can easily find *nix-based virtual servers with 
full access for around $20/month and I've seen virtual Windows servers 
for nearly as cheap.  (Or as a riskier option: I've been joking about 
setting up a paid darcs hosting provider and if you want to invest in 
that...)

Barring that, you could instead have your developers pull and/or push 
directly between each other.  One developer could be in charge of either 
directly copying the repository to the shared host or you could set up 
in XP a Scheduled Task or some other automated backup tool to do that. 
I'd suggest maybe even looking into a richer backup tool like perhaps 
Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition and regularly backing up *every* 
developer's repository.

To allow developers to pull from each other in XP it could be as easy as 
right-clicking on that developer's "clean and public ready" repository 
and "Sharing..." to set the repository so that anyone can read it on 
your LAN (local network).  You would then see that share in My Network 
Places on the other computers.   It's been a while since I've shared a 
repository this way in XP, but IIRC, you should be able to directly take 
that path from My Network Places and give it to darcs pull, for example:

darcs pull "\\devAcomp\project-repo"

You'll get the nice interactive "which changes from this remote 
repository do want"...

Then you can either designate a "Build Master" to act as your "central 
repository" (sort of, but not really) and have your Build Master darcs 
pull from every other developer's repository (that way to get the most 
recent build a developer can darcs pull "\\buildmaster\project-repo") or 
you can have each developer always pull from every other developer, and 
handle things like "latest build" via good communication ("Joe's build 
works and passes tests so he's going to tag it with the new version 
number." "Wait, he should pull Fix for X from Dave's repository first." 
...).

But that's assuming that you are on the same network and can securely 
share folders in that manner.  If you don't trust your LAN or don't have 
a central LAN/VPN, then things get more complicated, but there are still 
good ways to do it and even if "complicated" they can all be explained 
if you take the time to learn...  I would be happy to try to lead you 
through other scenarios if you are willing to better enumerate the 
restraints of your environment.

Hopefully that helps,

--
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/