[Haskell-cafe] ANN: darcs 2.3 beta 4

[Petr Rockai]

Hi again!

We have decided to delay the release cycle slightly for 2.3 and release another
beta. The primary reason for this is our Windows support -- I would like to
invite all Windows users to install darcs-beta and give it a ride. If you have
a working cabal-install, all you need to do is run:

    $ cabal update
    $ cabal install darcs-beta

(this works on all platforms; you may need to use -f-curl, if you don't have
the cURL headers available -- this is often the case on Windows). If you do not
have cabal-install, please follow the instructions near the end of this
message, "Installing on Windows".

In addition to using cabal-install, you can also download a tarball from
http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.2.98.4.tar.gz and build manually (see
the build instructions in README inside the tarball).

Feedback
--------

To make the darcs 2.3 release a good one, we still need testing feedback:
please drop a note to darcs-users@ if you have installed darcs-beta, or failed
to install it. If you run into any bugs, we need to know about them.

Thanks!

The question of GHC 6.8
-----------------------

Using GHC 6.10.3 or newer is *strongly recommended*. You may compile darcs with
GHC 6.8, but there are several caveats. If you are using 6.8.2 or older, please
disable mmap support (pass -f-mmap to cabal install or runghc Setup configure
below). Note that the GHC 6.8.2 that ships with Debian Lenny is not affected
and it should be safe to keep mmap enabled. It is also recommended to disable
use of Hackage zlib when compiling with GHC 6.8.2 (including the Debian Lenny
version): pass -f-zlib to cabal. When using zlib, we have seen occasional
crashes with error messages like "openBinaryFile: file locked" -- this is a
known GHC 6.8.2 bug (and is fixed in GHC 6.8.3). Last, if you are using a
64-bit system, darcs may hang when you exit a pager when compiled with GHC
older than 6.10.3. Although this is harmless, it is quite inconvenient.

Overall, the status of GHC 6.8 is "semi-supported": for many cases, things will
work just fine, especially if you take a little extra caution with compilation
flags.

Installing on Windows
---------------------

To install darcs on Windows systems from scratch, please download the Haskell
Platform and MSYS:

 * http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/2009.2.0.1/HaskellPlatform-2009.2.0.1-setup.exe
 * http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MSYS+Base+System/MSYS-1.0.11-rc-1.exe/download

After installing both, you should have an "MSYS" icon: run MSYS and in the
terminal window type:

    $ cabal update  
    $ cabal install darcs-beta -f-curl

This should download, compile and install all required dependencies and
darcs-beta itself. The resulting darcs executable will be placed into the
Haskell Platform executables folder, and should be accessible from the MSYS
shell (just type "darcs --version" to check).

Yours,
   Petr.