[Haskell-cafe] ANN: darcs 2.3 beta 1

[Petr Rockai]

Hi!

I'd like to announce immediate availability of a first beta release of darcs
2.3. There is a number of improvements and bugfixes over the last stable
release (2.2). Moreover, work has been done on performance of "darcs whatsnew"
for large repositories. This has also introduced a slight risk of regressions,
but please note that all of the disruptive changes are in read-only code
paths: the new code will never touch your repository, so it is unable to cause
permanent harm. The worst that could happen is that you get no or bad diff from
"darcs whatsnew". (This is also a reason why we need your testing!)

There is only a single installation package for this release of darcs:
cabalised source. (Please note that the final version with also come with the
legacy autoconf-based buildsystem, for the last time.)

You can either download a tarball from
<http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.2.98.1.tar.gz> and build manually (see
the build instructions in README inside the tarball), or, alternatively, you
can use cabal-install to obtain a copy (the beta release is now available on
Hackage):

        $ cabal update
        $ cabal install darcs-beta

This should give you a darcs binary in `~/.cabal/bin` -- you should probably
add that to your PATH.

(Note: The package name on Hackage is different, since people installing darcs
from Hackage are expecting a stable version. The name change means that you
cannot use the Hackage version to build other packages that depend on the darcs
library: you either need the tarball for this, or you can use the stable
version from Hackage.)

There is a quick (possibly incomplete) list of important changes:

 * lots and lots of documentation changes (Trent)
 * haskeline improvements (Judah)
 * cabal as default buildsystem (many contributors)
 * fixes in darcs check/repair memory usage (Bertram, David)
 * performance improvement in subtree record (Reinier)
 * --summary --xml (Florian Gilcher)
 * changes --max-count (Eric and myself)
 * fix changes --only-to-files for renames (Dmitry)
 * performance fix in "darcs changes" (Benedikt)
 * hardlinks on NTFS (Salvatore)
 * coalesce more changes when creating rollbacks (David)
 * new unit test runner (Reinier)
 * darcs-shell in contrib (László, Trent)
 * .authorspellings (Simon) -- I find this to be controversial though
 * working directory index and substantial "darcs wh" optimisation (myself)
 * gzip CRC checking and repair feature (Ganesh)

and there is a number of issues that has been resolved since 2.2:

 *  948: darcsman (Trent)
 * 1206: countable nouns (Trent)
 * 1285: cabal test v. cabal clean (Trent)
 * 1302: use resolved, not resolved-in-unstable (Trent)
 * 1235: obliterate --summary (Rob)
 * 1270: no MOTD for --xml-output (Lele)
 * 1311: cover more timezones (Dave)
 * 1292: re-encoding haskeline input (Judah)
 * 1313: clickable ToC and refs in PDF manual Trent)
 * 1310: create merged \darcsCommand{add} (Trent)
 * 1333: better "cannot push to current repository" warning (Petr)
 * 1347: (autoconf) check for unsafeMMapFile if mmap use enabled (Dave)
 * 1361: specify required includes for curl in cabal file (Reinier)
 * 1379: remove libwww support (Trent)
 * 1366: remove unreachable code for direct ncurses use (Trent)
 * 1271: do not install two copies of darcs.pdf (Trent)
 * 1358: encode non-ASCII characters in mail headers (Reinier)
 * 1393: swap "darcs mv" and "darcs move" (Trent)
 * 1405: improve discoverability of global author file (Trent)
 * 1402: don't "phone home" about bugs (Trent)
 * 1301: remove obsolete zsh completion scripts (Trent)
 * 1162: makeAbsolute is now a total function (Ben F)
 * 1269: setpref predist - exitcode ignored bug (Ben M)
 * 1415: --edit-long-comment, not --edit-description, in help (Trent)
 * 1413: remove duplicate documentation (Trent)
 * 1423: complain about empty add/remove (Trent)
 * 1437: Implement darcs changes --max-count (Eric)
 * 1430: lazy pattern matching in (-:-) from Changes command module (Dmitry)
 * 1434: refactor example test (Trent)
 * 1432: refer to %APPDATA%, not %USERPROFILE% (Trent)
 * 1186: give a chance to abort if user did not edit description file (Dmitry)
 * 1446: make amend-record -m foo replace only the patch name (Dmitry)
 * 1435: default to get --hashed from a darcs-1.0 source (Trent)
 * 1312: update and reduce build notes (Trent)
 * 1351: fix repository path handling on Windows (Salvatore)
 * 1173: support hard links on NTFS (Salvatore)
 * 1248: support compressed inventories for darcs-1 repos (Ganesh)
 * 1455: implement "darcs help environment" (Trent)

Yours,
   Petr.

-- 
Petr Ročkai | http://web.mornfall.net
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms. (George Wald)