[slime-devel] Re: Darcs [was: Fix utf-8 net-encoding for Allegro]

[Luke Gorrie]

Helmut Eller <heller at common-lisp.net> writes:

> - how mature is Luke's darcs-mode?  Or is there something better?

darcs-mode is very basic and scarcely touched since it was created.
I haven't been using darcs very much (but I use darcs-mode when I do.)

The illustrious John Wiegley has more recently written a fancier darcs
interface that I haven't tried myself:

  http://www.newartisans.com/johnw/Emacs/darcsum.el

> It would be useful, if we could keep CVS as the default and offer Darcs
> as alternative until we know that Darcs is up to the task.  Is that
> possible?

There are some cvs->darcs converters. I have tried one called 'tailor'
that seemed quite okay.

I'm also frustrated with CVS and fond of Darcs but I do think it pays
to be conservative with revision control. How about if some Darcs fan
creates a Darcs mirror of SLIME CVS (e.g. on common-lisp.net) and we
see how many people use it and how they like it.

NB: I have an uneasy feeling that Darcs is not quite as simple as it
looks. Nikodemus Siivola and me had a project to suck lots of Darcs
repos into one Whacking Great Big repo but discovered that you can't
'pull' from multiple repos if they don't have a common ancestor. (I
assumed that all repos would have "the null repository" as a common
ancestor.) I asked about this on the Darcs list and got an answer that
I didn't understand and this made me uncomfortable because I thought
that I understood how Darcs works.

Cheers,
Luke

P.S. Martin Pool is a clever fellow who is writing a Darcs-like
version control system, http://www.bazaar-ng.org/, but that is much
more bleeding edge.

P.P.S. I seem to have some changes to darcs-mode in my local repo but
I'm unable to push them just now. Maybe I haven't had enough coffe but
I'm confused about not being able to push or pull just now:

luke at monkey:~/hacking/darcs-mode$ darcs push
Pushing to /home/luke/public_html/repos/darcs-mode/...

Fri Feb 11 10:18:09 CET 2005  Luke Gorrie <luke at member.fsf.org>
  * darcs-find-file-hook fixed for directory not existing
Shall I push this patch? (1/2) [ynWvxqadjk], or ? for help: y

Fri Apr  8 19:04:19 CEST 2005  Tomasz Cholewo <cholewo at lexmark.com>
  * Fix for XEmacs: define temporary-file-directory.
Shall I push this patch? (2/2) [ynWvxqadjk], or ? for help: y

darcs failed:  Refusing to apply patches leading to conflicts.
There are conflicts in the following files:
./darcs.el

luke at monkey:~/hacking/darcs-mode$ darcs pull
Pulling from "/home/luke/public_html/repos/darcs-mode/"...
No remote changes to pull in!