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This manual provides a stable documentation for using darcs.
To find more up-to-date and complementary information, please consult the
darcs wiki.
Darcs is a revision control system, along the lines of Subversion, Git or
Mercurial. That means that it keeps track of various revisions and branches of your
project, allows for changes to propagate from one branch to another. Darcs has two
particularly distinctive features which differ from other revision control
systems:
The primary simplifying notion of darcs is that every copy of your
source code is a full repository. This is dramatically different from Subversion,
in which the normal usage is for there to be one central repository from
which source code will be checked out.
This has several advantages, since you can harness the full
power of darcs in any scratch copy of your code, without committing your
possibly destabilizing changes to a central repository.
In the world of darcs, the source tree is not the fundamental
object, but rather the patch is the fundamental object. Rather than a
patch being defined in terms of the difference between two trees, a tree is
defined as the result of applying a given set of patches to an empty tree.
Moreover, these patches may be reordered without changing the tree.
This makes many operations, like cherry-picking or merging, much more natural.
In darcs, the equivalent of a svn ``commit'' is called record, because it
doesn't put the change into any remote or centralized repository. Changes
are always recorded locally, meaning no net access is required in order to
work on your project and record changes as you make them.
You can choose to perform an interactive record, in which case darcs will
prompt you for each change you have made and ask if you wish to record it.
Of course, you can tell darcs to record all the changes in a given file, or
to skip all the changes in a given file, or go back to a previous change,
or whatever.
As a corollary to the ``local'' nature of the record operation, if a change
hasn't yet been published to the world--that is, if the local repository
isn't accessible by others--you can safely unrecord a change (even if it
wasn't the most recently recorded change) and then re-record it
differently, for example if you forgot to add a file, introduced a bug or
realized that what you recorded as a single change was really two separate
changes.
Most darcs commands support an interactive interface. The ``revert''
command, for example, which undoes unrecorded changes has the same
interface as record, so you can easily revert just a single change. Pull,
push, send and apply all allow you to view and interactively select which
changes you wish to pull, push, send or apply.
Darcs has support for integrating a test suite with a repository. If you
choose to use this, you can define a test command (e.g. ``make check'') and
have darcs run that command on a clean copy of the project either prior to
recording a change or prior to applying changes--and to reject changes
that cause the test to fail.
Darcs does not require a specialized server in order to make a repository
available for read access. You can use http, ftp, or even just a plain old
ssh server to access your darcs repository.
Darcs doesn't try to manage write access. That's your business. Supported
push methods include direct ssh access (if you're willing to give
direct ssh access away), using sudo to allow users who already have shell
access to only apply changes to the repository, or verification of
gpg-signed changes sent by email against a list of allowed keys. In
addition, there is support for submission of patches by email that
are not automatically applied, but can easily be applied with a shell escape
from a mail reader.
Renames or moves of files and directories, of course are handled properly,
so when you rename a file or move it to a different directory, its history
is unbroken, and merges with repositories that don't have the file renamed
will work as expected.
You can use the ``darcs replace'' command to modify all occurrences of a
particular token (defined by a configurable set of characters that are
allowed in ``tokens'') in a file. This has the advantage that merges with
changes that introduce new copies of the old token will have the effect of
changing it to the new token--which comes in handy when changing a
variable or function name that is used throughout a project.
You can easily configure the default flags passed to any command on either
a per-repository or a per-user basis or a combination thereof.
Next: Getting started
Up: Darcs User Manual
Previous: Contents
Contents
Daniil
2014-02-06