[darcs-users] providing one-time fast-export in darcs

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

The flip-side for maintainability is that darcs-bridge etc will diverge
from darcs. Perhaps that's ok.

Aside from that, the main concern I have is that darcs-fastexport does
the wrong thing with conflicts - you lose information, because it just
recreates pristine after each patch, rather than producing a proper
merge. Baking that into darcs means we're effectively adopting broken
behaviour.

On the other hand I haven't really heard of anyone noticing this in
exported repositories and perhaps something is better than nothing.

On 21/12/2013 17:52, Eric Kow wrote:
> Sounds like a good way to encourage pushing as much functionality as
> possible into libraries (to avoid the code duplication).
> 
> No suggestions for the UI, except perhaps to rework the darcs convert
> command slightly.
> 
> Surprised that importing should be harder than exporting.
> 
> 
> On 18 December 2013 15:11, Guillaume Hoffmann <guillaumh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'd like to suggest that darcs should provide built-in, one-time
>> fast-export output.
>>
>> Let me explain why we would want this, and why only the export direction:
>>
>> - narrative for darcs 2.10:  a built-in fast-export feature fits in a
>> narrative that presents darcs as a system that people can try knowing
>> they are free to switch to another tool without much work. I hope that
>> it would lower the resistance to trying it.
>>
>> - maintainability: every now and then people pop up on IRC asking for
>> the code of darcs-bridge, or saying that it does not build. (Granted,
>> this happens with low frequency). With darcs providing natively a
>> fast-export output we fix this situation for the export direction.
>>
>> - implementation easiness: we already have a couple of implementations
>> ([1], [2]). After all fast-export without marks support is just a
>> fancy `darcs log -v`. On the other hand, fast-import is much more
>> complex (to begin with, it is not read-only) and still an open
>> problem, AFAIK.
>>
>>
>> I'm not sure if the best way to provide this feature would be `darcs
>> log --fast-export`, or a new command like `darcs fast-export`. The
>> former would convey the idea that the output is for a one-time use
>> only, without marks support, with no garantee of being the same if
>> history if reordered, etc. But if we want to support incremental
>> export, then it gets more complicated that a fancy `darcs log` output,
>> and probably deserves a separate command.
>>
>> I'd be happy with a minimal but working export support, with more
>> feature-rich export/import tool being separated from darcs.
>>
>> Code duplication between seems smelly, but I think we are not talking
>> about much code (between 125 lines in Petr's fastconvert [1] which
>> would be what we would use, and 600 lines in Owen's darcs-bridge which
>> is more complicated [2]).
>>
>> Opinions?
>>
>> Guillaume
>>
>> [1] http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs-fastconvert/Export.hs
>> [2] http://hub.darcs.net/owst/darcs-bridge-export-branch/browse/Export.hs
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> 
> 
>