[darcs-users] darcs newbie questions

Michael Hendricks michael at ndrix.org
Fri Feb 17 21:49:30 UTC 2012


Before I ask my questions, I wanted to compliment everyone on darcs'
progress.  I used darcs for a couple months six years ago and stopped
because of various performance problems.  I've been trying it again
for the last couple days and it's much faster.  The wikibook
Understanding Darcs is also a great resource.  My thanks to all
involved.

For the following questions, I'm using darcs 2.5.2 installed from
Hackage via cabal.

Is it possible to colorize diff command output?  I've set
DARCS_ALWAYS_COLOR=1 and DARCS_DO_COLOR_LINES=1.  The output of `darcs
whatsnew` has color but `darcs diff --unified` is black and white.
I'd like for them both to have color.

Why does `darcs record --edit-long-comment` prompt for the patch name?
 It seems redundant to prompt for the name and then open an editor
where one can enter the name as well.  For now, I've added the
following to ~/.darcs/defaults to skip the prompt.  Is there a better
way?

    record edit-long-comment
    record patch-name ...

Is it possible for `darcs changes` to use $DARCS_PAGER?  For example,
if I run `env DARCS_PAGER='less -R -F' darcs changes` the pager is not
used.  Since that command's output can be very long, automatically
invoking a pager would be convenient.

In other version control tools, I will often look through recent
changes, find one that's interesting and then display its patch.
Subversion's log command displays a revision number and one can do
`svn diff -c 1234` to see the patch.  Git`s log command shows a commit
hash allowing one to run `git show abcde123` to see the patch.  The
best I've found in darcs is `darcs changes --number` followed by
`darcs diff -n 1234`.  Do patches have a more permanent identifier
that I should be using instead?

Related to the previous question: `darcs diff -n 123` is quite a bit
slower than `darcs changes -v`, even though the latter shows the patch
inline.  Is the performance decrease because diff has to find context
lines?  If I don't care about context lines, can I somehow invoke diff
so it quickly shows me the same patch as `changes -v`?

Last question: is it safe for a newbie like me to run darcs-beta day to day?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

--
Michael


More information about the darcs-users mailing list