Peter Verswyvelen
Mmm, my email was indeed very unclear about my question.
A very simple example: suppose a development team is working on a program. This program consist of modules A and B. Each module has it's own Darcs repository.
Module A requires B. When a new developer wants to get the source code, he does a "darcs get server://program/A", which gives him only the latest version of A. So he manually needs to do "darcs get server://program/B" (that B is required is usually discovered after a compilation error, talking to other developers to find out what the dependencies are, or by reading the cabal file). Furthermore it is unclear which version of A required which version of B (so you can't really roll back to old versions).
Now assume you don't have 2 modules but dozens...
I can't imagine such kind of situation, unless you are really working on a very big project. Usually, if your project depends on other projects, mostly it should work with stable version of other projects, but not their develop version. You might need some features of other projects that is still under development, than you might have a few repositories. However, such situation should be well known across all developers of your project. And usually you guys should agree on one particular develop version of those dependency projects, to make sure that you guys are working with the same set of API's. If those aforementioned dependency projects are just some modules within your big projects, I think the way to go is actually make them in the same repository. I can't see the benefit of splitting those small modules to different repositories, apart from not letting other people know your current developing code. But we are using a distributed revision control system, as darcs is, you can choose which patch to push to the "upper stream" anyway. So my point of view is that it is a management issue rather than a issue of revision control system. The developers should actually agree upon a proper set of API's before you guys actually start building the modules separately. Another reason for such kind of RCS built-in dependency check being impossible is that darcs are basically dealing with a bunch of dependent patches. Those patches only know their dependencies within a particular repository. You can't logically put a dependency of an external repository before you start pulling from that repository.
To me, any version control system should be able to track dependencies between repositories. Something similar like Cabal's dependency system.
Can you provide some examples of RCS that have such kind of dependency system?
So my question is really, how do you solve the dependency tracking between several Darcs repositories?
Because every source tree is a branch in darcs, you can't. -- c/* __o/* <\ * (__ */\ <