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

Gwern Branwen gwern0 at gmail.com
Thu Jan 15 00:48:31 UTC 2009


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On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 7:46 PM, Trent W. Buck  wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 07:33:28PM -0500, Gwern Branwen wrote:
>>>> So the filestore darcs backend is done.
>>>> http://johnmacfarlane.net/repos/filestore
>>>
>>> Perhaps I'm obtuse, but what *is* a filestore and what are the potential
>>> applications for this work?
>>
>> You know Gitit? And Orchid? They're both wikis written in Haskell.
>>
>> The cool thing about them (besides Gitit's Pandoc capabilities) is
>> how they manage all their articles as files tracked by a DVCS (Git,
>> and darcs, respectively). So you can just accidentally the entire
>> wiki, make changes to articles locally with your editor, and
>> push/send patches. This has a lot of advantages compared to a
>> MediaWiki setup - it has the advanced revision capabilities we all
>> expect of darcs/git, it has a sane API for bots and people
>> processing the wiki (just grab a copy, and then operate locally on
>> the convenient files, instead of the instant insanity of dealing
>> with the PHP web API MediaWiki exposes), it's a simple setup, and so
>> on.
>
> Ah, so it's a library that provides an abstraction layer for using an
> arbitrary VCS[0] to store files.  Similar to how a libdb allows you to
> store data in any RDBMS without changing your code.

Well, probably not *any* VCS. I'm sure there must be VCSs which can't
provide the base functionality (for example, if it was all stored in a
database and couldn't be searched).

> [0] though currently limited to Darcs.

No, it has both Git and Darcs support (John did Git, I did Darcs).
It'd be kind of silly for Gitit to switch to filestore if that meant
becoming darcs-only. For more reasons than what it'd do to its name...

- --
gwern
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