Re: darcs switchover

Malcolm.Wallace:

"Simon Marlow" writes:

...

The aim is to eventually switch over to using darcs for our revision control. The point of this message is to find out what constraints people have that will affect when we can throw the switch.

One thing it occurs to me to ask is what will be happening to CVS commit messages, once the switchover to darcs happens?

I have investigated this briefly, and it seems that darcs does not yet directly support mailing out commit messages from a repository. There is a wrapper script at darcs get http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/darcs-mail but this requires administration privileges on the hosting machine, since you need to rename the darcs binary proper, then install the wrapper in its place. Also, it is unclear to me whether this wrapper works equally well in all situations, e.g. with 'darcs apply' on the hosting machine, 'darcs push' from a separate repository on the same host, or 'darcs push' from a remote machine with ssh.

Anyone sufficiently familiar with this to shed any light?

darcs-mail mails changes summaries when `apply --all' is on the cmd line -- which is the case when pushing over ssh. So it works quite nicely for the situation where you push over ssh to a central repository. A nice summary is then sent out to each address in _darcs/prefs/mailinglist. We've used this internally at UNSW for about 6 months now, and has worked quite well. I originally wrote this script as a temporary fix until darcs supported post-apply hooks. If it does now, perhaps there's no need for the wrapper, and instead a mail program can be invoked by darcs itself as a hook (i.e. just the core of darcs-mail can be `hooked'). So, in summary, if darcs post-apply hooks now work, we could strip down darcs-mail for our purposes, otherwise we could use darcs-mail, (though it only works over darcs push ssh atm). -- Don