On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 06:24:52AM -0700, Stephen Birch wrote: > Okay ... I missed the development of arch. Boy ... its difficult to > keep up with everything going on. How did the arch project improve on > Subversion?
The main cool thing about Arch is that branching can be done cross-repository and it remembers the merge history. So that makes decentralized development much easier than with, say, Subversion or CVS. With Arch, the standard way of collaborating on a project is to tell an author "here, merge from my repo." Darcs takes all of this farther yet. With darcs, branching is not only possible cross-repository, but also extremely easy and a fundamental operation. "darcs get" (akin to cvs co) creates a branch that is your working copy. When you hack around there, you use "darcs record" to commit your changes. When you want to send them to the upstream, you use "darcs push" to merge them to the upstream repo, or "darcs send" if you don't have access to the upstream. (It will e-mail a patchset to the upstream maintainer.) Unlike Arch or (SVN, CVS, whatever), darcs branching also preserves each individual patch in its entirety, complete with its individual log message and individual changes. So it is possible to back out or review any patch from any branch at any time. To contribute to a project that uses Darcs, your general procedure would be, for example: 1. darcs get http://darcs.complete.org/darcs-buildpackage 2. hack around in darcs-buildpackage, using darcs record to note your changes 3. run "darcs send" to submit the patches you made to upstream That's easier than with *any* other VC system I've seen. -- John -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
