[darcs-users] Centralized Darcs usage

[Sébastien Pierre]

Le vendredi 21 avril 2006 à 11:40 -0300, zooko at zooko.com a écrit :

> I understand that you want this functionality to be integrated into your
> revision control tool, and that is a reasonable thing to want, but darcs
> doesn't do that.

I actually ment that I would like to extend Darcs with this feature (I
don't really care if it is integrated into the mainline or not). For
instance, Mercurial makes it pretty easy to add such extra features,
when customization is required.

Is Darcs able to be easily extended ?

> I mean that people are expected to use darcs to transfer patches from the
> separate project repositories into the unified all-in-one repository, and they
> are expected not to use darcs to transfer patches from the unified all-in-one
> repository into the separate project repositories.

The problem here is that in this process, the "unified all-in-one"
repository would contain the "stable development version" of all
projects, as opposed to the individual projects repositories that
contain "possible unstable development versions".

For instance, let's say I have three projects : P1, P2 and P3. Each
project has its own repository (RP1, RP2, RP3), and each of this
repository gets integrated into a big central one (RC) periodically (say
each day).

Developers of a particular project (P1, P2, P3) will usually first pull
from the project repository (RP1, RP2, RP3), do the changes, and then
push back changes to RP1, RP2 or RP3.

At the end of each day, RP1, RP2, RP3 are integrated into RC -- which
should usually go well. However, if a problem occurs, we could be in the
situation where RC is not completely in sync with RP1, RP2 and RP3,
because the latest changes in any of one breaks something (ex: API
change in RP1 that makes P2 brake).

So basically, most developers will want to pull out projects from RC,
while RP1, RP2 and RP3 are only for developers actively working on P1,
P2 or P3.

I should also add that at some point, changes in RC will be pushed to a
"production repository" R.

 -- Sébastien