On Sunday 21 August 2005 21:09, Michael Price wrote:
> On 8/21/05, Frederik Eaton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > On Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 03:55:38PM +0200, Albert Reiner wrote:
> > > [Frederik Eaton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Sat, 20 Aug 2005 
15:00:22 -0700]:
> > > > (a) I think it's useless and shouldn't be part of darcs
> > >
> > > Exactly my sentiment.
>
> Me too. Its pointless.
>
> > > Isn't this the classic occasion for a simple wrapper script?  One
> > > might want to put a reference implementation into some contrib/
> > > subdirectory of the distribution.
>
> Exactly my thoughts.
>
> > Except that you could put a reference implementation into darcs
> > itself and then it would be easier to access. *shrug*
>
> No need to clutter up darcs for this little used case.

I don't think one should dismiss an idea from a darcs user like that.  
It may be that the people who don't like the idea don't have the 
problem of knowing whether a repository still contains data that don't 
exist anywhere else, but this question is quite interesting in general 
when you have potentially many distributed repositories.  Whether this 
is implemented in darcs, or via a wrapper script, or implicitly through 
"good workflow" does not matter.  The problem should somehow be 
discussed in a darcs introduction.

Why don't we start by putting some text into the darcs wiki, under the 
"Hints and Tips" item?  We could describe the workflow that leads to 
this problem, plus how to solve it with plain darcs, plus (if it 
exists) a different workflow that doesn't have this problem (I doubt 
that is possible).  I find myself often keeping old repositories around 
because I don't know whether they still contain something useful.

I unfortunately lost track who suggested this feature originally.  Would 
you be willing to add an entry into darcs' wiki?  With plain darcs, you 
can e.g. solve the problem with a combination of

darcs whatsnew -ls (to see whether there are unrecorded changes)
darcs push --dry-run (to see how many patches have not left the repo)
darcs send -o FILENAME (to export some of these patches to files, if 
they should not be pushed)
rm -rf [^_]* (to delete the working directory, which can be restored 
with "darcs revert", to save space)
rm -rf _darcs/current/* (to delete the pristine tree, which can be 
restored with "darcs repair", to save space)
cd ..; rm -rf REPO (the final step)

Note also that "darcs get" uses hard links when possible, so that a new 
repo is really cheap in terms of disk space.  Having many repos is not 
a bad thing.  "darcs optimize" can also be used to create hard links 
between repositories that were created independently.

-erik

-- 
Erik Schnetter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   http://www.aei.mpg.de/~eschnett/

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