[Haskell-cafe] Re: announcing darcs 2.0.0pre3

[John Goerzen]

On 2008-01-22, David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> wrote:
> We are happy to announce the third prerelease version of darcs 2! Darcs 2

David,

I'm very happy to see this, and will be trying it out today!

I have one concern though, and it's a big one.  On your DarcsTwo page,
it says:

  Darcs get is now much faster, and always operates in a "lazy"
  fashion, meaning that patches are downloaded only when they are
  needed. . . if the source repository disappears, or you lose network
  connectivity, some operations may fail. I do not believe these
  dangers will prove particularly problematic, but we may need to
  fine-tune the user interface to make it more clear what is going on.

To me, that's a showstopper.  This was really one of the huge
advantages of Darcs over, say, svn.  I can darcs get a repo from a
server to the laptop, and hack on it doing anything, with full
history, with no need for net connectivity.  Losing this feature would
be a huge problem for me and many others.

The other benefits include having a complete local copy of a project's
history in case that project's repo ever goes away.  Also, I'm
concerned that if I do a darcs get from one local repo to another, and
remove the original one, that my other repo will no longer be complete.

I hope that this means it's just a default, that there is still some
way to pull down everything that could possibly be needed?  But from
the way the wiki page is sounded, it doesn't sound that way.

-- John