[darcs-users] Interoperability?

[Aggelos Economopoulos]

On Friday 10 October 2003 15:14, David Roundy wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 08:26:06PM +0200, Luna Kid wrote:
> > Now, can you see some easy/good/whatever oportunities for darcs, or any
> > *simple* external tools to somehow support this scenario and make the
> > life of this developer easier for the benefit of both him and the
> > COOLSTUFF project?
>
> cvsps is a pretty nice tool for getting information out of a CVS archive in
> a reasonably friendly format.  I've got a 90 line perl script that creates
> a darcs mirror of a CVS project, using a combination of cvsps to get the
> patchset information and cvs to get the actual data.  If there were no
> binary files in the repo, the script could be made much more robust by
> using cvsps exclusively, but unfortunately cvsps barfs on binary files.  :(
>
> The main difficulty comes in trying to get bi-directional capability--that
> is, getting your changes back into CVS and then out again.  The problem is
> that there is a mismatch between how darcs views the world and how CVS
> views it.  There is always darcs diff, which isn't bad for sending patches
> to non-darcs-using people, but then when they make the changes in CVS
> you'll get a conflict between your patch and itself.

Not that I have any use for bidirectional darcs - cvs communication myself, 
but wouldn't a cvs_export command that appends a line of the form

DarcsPatchID: mangled_patch_name optional_repo_name

to the cvs log be enough? On the originating developers repository, the import 
tool would know the patch is already applied and for other darcs-using 
developers the import script could either pull the darcs patch from the 
supplied repository or failing that just make a new patch.

Let me restate that I'm not requesting such a feature, I think David's work on 
darcs would be better spent elsewhere (scalability, gui, anything that's fun 
to code).

Aggelos