[darcs-users] Darcs spins

[David Roundy]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 02:49:45AM +0000, John Goerzen wrote:
> I'm trying out darcs.  I have this package called MissingH that I
> currently maintain in Arch.  It is mostly my code, but also includes
> code from two other projects (Wash and Hsemail).  I take small parts of
> those projects -- but entire files -- and move them into different
> places in my own tree.
> 
> Now, Hsemail already uses darcs and I've imported Wash into darcs and
> then could just darcs pull it into my tree.  That works well.
> 
> I tried the same trick with Hsemail.  darcs pull -av appears to work,
> but after it says "diffing dir...", it just sits there, using lots of
> CPU and doing nothing.  I let it go for quite awhile, and strace didn't
> show it actually accessing any files.
> 
> Any ideas?

This isn't a good way of going about this.  Theoretically, it's correct,
but in practice, you're looking at massive conflicts, which will bring
darcs to its knees.  Darcs doesn't cope well with "one-sided" conflicts.
In this case, even if your initial import worked, every time you tried to
pull from the upstream Wash or Hsemail repos, you'd see a conflict, and the
files you deleted would resurface during the conflict resolution.

If you really do want to import the repositories of other projects, put
their code in a subdirectory (at least in the arch-converted repo this
should be an option), and then you won't have conflicts with both projects
trying to create the same file.  And you probably don't want to delete any
of their files, either, since that'll lead to conflicts.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org