[darcs-users] Questions about darcs (esp. branching)

Mark Stosberg mark at stosberg.com
Wed Nov 24 03:23:48 UTC 2010


> Reading the http://wiki.darcs.net/PreparationBranches article you're
> likely referring to, it seems like "preparation branch" is just a fancy
> way of talking about the workflow that results from using any DVCS, ie.
> being able to prepare your patches/commits locally, editing them at will
> and only sending them when you're good and ready.
> 
> I think the original author of this page, Mark Stosberg (?) was
> intending a sort of compare and contrast approach in talking about
> workflows, ie. that
> 
> - darcs and git *both* support preparation branches
> - darcs also supports spontaneous branches

I don't think I wrote I "preparation branches" page, although I did
write the first "spontaneous branches" page and may have been the first
to use that term.

>> 3) Do people really use spontaneous branches? This kind of "magic
>> string" stuff makes me really nervous, and is the kind of thing that
>> gave Perl programmers such a bad name!
>> [I'd also object that they're neither spontaneous nor branches, but
>> language is often funny like that.]
> 
> I don't think I make much conscious use of it.  Well, if I have a
> project with some sub-projects, I do sometimes record patches patches
> that start with the sub-project name, thinking that this will make it
> easier for me to find them.

My work flow is based around ticket numbers in a ticket tracker. You
could say that we use the the ticket numbers as the identifiers for a
spontaneous branch workflow. We are always pushing or pulling the
patches that are tagged with with one ticket number. When we do a
launch, we are just pulling all the tickets that match one of a
collection of ticket numbers. Darcs handles tracking the dependencies
between patches (and thus, between tickets) for us, and it generally
works extremely well, so that we go *months* without anyone making a
branch for anything else. Every so often we have a major long-lived
feature come up, and we create a "feature branch" for that.

    Mark



More information about the darcs-users mailing list