Features

Some Key Features

  • Offline mode. Darcs is distributed. This means your own working directory is a repository in its own right. You can quickly record your work even if you’re on the road with no access to the server or with a bad network connection. When you get home, you do a darcs push to transmit it to the public server.
  • Local preparation. Darcs enables you to modify patches before sending them to a remote repository, or even to throw them away completely and start over.
  • Easy branching and merging. Every repository is a branch. There is no branch administration except pushing and pulling between repositories.
  • Easy collaboration by e-mail. If you want to add a feature or bugfix to some project, you can make a local clone, apply your changes, then send the patches by email (darcs send). The project’s maintainers can decide whether to accept or reject the patches. This way, you do not need commit privileges to contribute.
  • Parallel development. Let’s say you follow the development of an open-source project, and you have some controversial patches that aren’t accepted by the official maintainers. No problem – make your changes and publish your own repository. It’s a fork, of sorts, but it’s still connected to the mainline. Whenever the official project makes changes, you can do a darcs pull to get them, and resolve any conflicts. This way, your fork is kept up to date.
  • Cherry-picking. If you’ve ever worked on a team, you will know that somebody often has a change you want, but which can’t be committed to the trunk yet. With Darcs you can grab just the one change by pulling it into your repository.
  • Interactivity. Darcs enables you to be precise and say “yes” or “no” to every change that you can include in your patch. Thus you can really create minimal patches, or separate your work in several patches, each one doing a consistent change. Other commands, like darcs pull and darcs push, behave the same.
  • Hosting. You can host your repositories with hub.darcs.net or darcsweb and share them to the world!

The Darcs way of (non-)branching

In version control systems, branching enable to work on parallel tasks without disturbing a main line of work. In distributed systems like Git or Mercurial, branches are explicitely created and merged (branch, merge).

With Darcs, with or without working in separate repositories, you can consider any (set of) patch(es) as a branch.

For instance say you are working on a task that has a ticket in a bug tracking system, with a ticket number of ‘123’. You need to make 3 separate but related patches to resolve this ticket. You name your ‘records’ for those patches like this:

RT#123 Update Documentation
RT#123 Fix bug
RT#123 Really fix bug

The consistent and unique names here allow this set of patches to be seen as a spontaneous branch. darcs has lots of options for working with this set of patches very easily:

# Merge the branch into a central repo:
$ darcs push -p 'RT#123'

# launch just this branch into the production copy
$ darcs pull -p 'RT#123'

# mail this branch to remote repo
$ darcs send -p 'RT#123'

# Review which patches are in this branch
$ darcs log -p 'RT#123'

This is an extremely easy to use and powerful feature which is especially helpful when the order you need to deliver changes is not the order in which you are able to start on them.

Related Pages