[darcs-users] darcs 2.3 beta 1

[Trent W. Buck]

Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> writes:

> The User Manual already recommends not hard-linking the pristine - see
> the docs for "darcs optimize", and "Reducing disk space usage" under
> "Getting Started".  So, it seems rather strange that darcs does this
> itself, by default, with no way to disable it!

It is probably referring to the pristine trees of pre-hashed
repositories.

> The user manual suggests that the darcs cache has to be explicitly
> enabled, but as far as I can tell it's on by default.

That's also stale documentation; by default a cache is created in
~/.darcs/cache (%APPDATA%/darcs/cache on Windows).

> How is it disabled?

By creating an empty ~/.darcs/sources file, and by removing any lines
starting with "cache:" from _darcs/prefs/sources of any existing
repositories.

Note that the cache ~/.darcs/cache is only useful for repositories that
share the same filesystem as ~/.darcs/cache is on -- for example, if all
your repositories live in /srv/vcs and that's a separate NFS mount to
/home, then the default cache is totally useless (and probably unused).
You'd want to create /srv/vcs/.cache-twb or something, or maybe make
/srv/vcs/.darcs-cache a world-writable directory with a sticky bit.  I
don't know if that would work, nor if Darcs is susceptible to cache
poisoning attacks.

> Can I strongly suggest that there should be a way to turn off
> hard-linking of pristine files in darcs 2.3, and furthermore that
> having it turned off should be the default.

+1 for that idea.

> I tried to find the manual for 2.3 - is it online anywhere?

It won't be until Petr makes an autoconf-based source release, and a
manual is built from that.  For now, the manual built from HEAD should
be close -- nobody touches the TeX-only parts of the manual much.

(Most of my work so far has been about making what was/is visible in TeX
also visible in "darcs help" and in "man darcs", rewriting and updating
it at the same time.)

As usual, a problem with a specific bit of documentation should be
addressed by filing a bug at bugs at darcs.net, either fixing it or
assigning it to me.  You can assign the bug to me when you first report
it by putting "[assignedto=twb]" at the end of the Subject header field.