[darcs-users] What version changed 'darcs changes' behavior?

[Gwern Branwen]

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Hiya everyone. So the filestore darcs backend is done. As ever, you
can find it at http://johnmacfarlane.net/repos/filestore and more
specifically
http://johnmacfarlane.net/repos/filestore/Data/FileStore/Darcs.hs

(Some of the code is pretty bad, especially the parsing of Darcs output.)

The implementation is complete, and with darcs darcs ('2.2.0pre2 (+ 88
patches)'), all John's tests pass with darcs.

But the thing is, they don't pass on his box, where he's running darcs
2.0.2 or something old like that. (He has since upgraded, I think.)

I eventually tracked the test failures back to a test of what happens
when you try to create a file *outside* the repository; part of the
definition calls 'darcs changes' on any proposed file, to see whether
it exists.

Darcs 2.0.2, when you call darcs changes on a non-existent file or one
outside the repository, blats 'file doesn't exist/outside the repo'
and proceeds to output the entire repo history (as if you specified no
file at all). The darcs I was working with does not do that; rather it
emits an empty . (The create function tries to parse this into a
history of revisions, fails, and this causes the test to fail in the
right way.)

So, I know that the backend only works with somewhat recent Darcs. I'd
like to know the exact version a user must have for it to work, for
the README. (When I went to try out the old darcs on Hackage, I
couldn't compile most of them, to say nothing of releases prior to
those.) Does anyone know?

- --
gwern
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