[Haskell-cafe] Re: [darcs-devel] announcing darcs 2.0.0pre3

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 09:47:06AM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> 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
>
> I'm very happy to see this, and will be trying it out today!

Great! I do recommend that you try the darcs version, as we've had a number
of improvements since the last prerelease.

> 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.

This is a definite danger, and I've considered making local gets always
complete, just because there's much less benefit for partial local gets
(except perhaps when hard links between the repos aren't possible).  But
I'm hesitant to add special-case code just yet, as the best solution is to
figure out a set of behavior that is readily-understood by users, and for
that purpose, consistent behavior is good.

> 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.

Running "darcs check", "darcs changes -s" or "darcs changes foobar" for
instance would ensure that you've got a complete repository.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University