[Haskell-cafe] [ANN] Darcs 2.18.1 release

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

Hi,

On behalf of the Darcs team, I would like to announce the release of
Darcs 2.18.1 [1].

The full release notes [2] are appended below.

Regards,

Ganesh

[1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/darcs-2.18.1
[2] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/darcs-2.18.1/changelog

Darcs 2.18.1, 25 Feb 2024

   * Supports GHC 9.8 and the most recent version of other dependencies
     at the time of release, with the exception of the tls 2.0 package,
     which has been held back because of problems connecting to
     hub.darcs.net (see https://bugs.darcs.net/issue2715).

   * Substantial rewrite of the 'darcs test' command.

     The most important user visible change is that a test script can now
     return an exit code of 125 to reflect an untestable/skipped state
     (as with with "git bisect run").

     This in turn means that a group of patches can be found to be
     responsible for a failure rather than just a single one. By default,
     Darcs will try to minimise such a group by reordering patches to
     remove irrelevant ones from the initial group found from the patch
     ordering in the repository. This behaviour can be disabled with
     --no-shrink-failure.

   * Remove support for downloading via curl

     This is no longer particularly useful as we now use modern,
     maintained Haskell libraries for native HTTP downloading, and
     substantially simplifies this area of the code.

   * Patch index: Significant performance improvement

     The patch index is used in commands like annotate and log. A couple
     of performance improvements were made that should speed up using the
     patch index.

   * Progress reporting

     Progress reports are now provided during more long-running
     operations, including updating the "index" (a cache that speeds up
     detecting changes in the working directory), and during merge
     operations.

     They also behave better on Windows and when outputting long lines.

   * Other changes/fixes:
     * Use hardlinks more often to share files between
       repositories/caches.
     * Support --leave-test-dir for all commands that support --test
     * Avoid extraneous "repo:." entries in _darcs/prefs/sources
       [issue2672]
     * Add 'darcs clean' command as an alias for 'darcs revert -l'
     * 'darcs rebase unsuspend': add more patch editing options
     * Fix stale lock files after Ctrl-C
     * External merge tools: preserve output, and fail if tool does
     * Properly reference renamed files in external merge [issue189]
     * Mark conflicts properly if tag pulled at the same time [issue2682]
     * Remove the useless optimize pristine subcommand
     * 'darcs convert': honour the --compress and --diff-algorithm
       options
     * Fix contrib/darcs-shell [issue2646]
     * Fix 'darcs pull --dont-allow-conflicts' with external-merge
       [issue1819]
     * Problems with local pristine files now tell user to run
       'darcs repair' [issue1981]
     * Fix various problems with symlinks, including on Windows
     * Add --no-prefs-templates option when creating a repository
     * Allow 'darcs rebase unsuspend' when there are non-conflicting
       unrecorded changes
     * Handle broken pending patches in 'darcs check' and 'darcs repair'
     * Improve error reporting when remote _darcs/format doesn't exist
     * 'darcs optimize reorder': add --deep/--shallow options
     * 'darcs optimize compress/uncompress': also handle pristine files
     * 'darcs optimize cache': don't work with lists of darcs repos
       Instead just the global cache is cleaned by checking hard-link
       counts
     * Skip the pager when $DARCS_PAGER / $PAGER are set to the empty
       string
     * 'darcs convert export': allow relative paths for --read-marks and
       --write-marks
     * Fix 'darcs amend --unrecord' to move unrecorded changes to pending
       [issue2697]
     * Don't treat cancelling an operation as failure [issue2074]
     * Fix cloning of ssh repo when using Ctrl-C to stop getting patches
       [issue2701]
     * Don't report invalid regexes as a bug in darcs [issue2702]
     * Add short option -n for --dry-run
     * 'darcs diff': support --look-for-moves and --look-for-adds
     * Fix buffering problem with 'darcs diff' [issue2704]
     * 'darcs obliterate' and 'darcs rebase': offer to revert any
       conflicting unrecorded changes
     * Stop displaying context lines in various interactive scenarios:
       it didn't work properly and would require a lot of work to fix.
     * Improve conflict display for Rebase and V3 patches
     * Increase size limit to 100K for environment variables like
       DARCS_PATCHES_XML, and warn when it is exceeded
     * 'darcs rebase unsuspend': improve the display of dropped
       dependencies
     * 'darcs amend --ask-deps': also provide a way to remove
       dependencies
     * 'darcs push': support --reorder-patches option
     * Remove the --remote-repo option
     * Don't display hints about using --set-default
     * Conflict resolution: unrecorded changes will suppress conflict
       marking of appropriate changes [issue2708]
     * Explain what a "clean tag" is in help for tag command
     * Fix problem with naming patch bundles after patches that contain
       characters incompatible with the current locale [issue2716]