[darcs-users] Any experience of TortoiseDarcs?

[Richard A. Smith]

Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:

> I'm wondering if anyone here has experience with TortoiseDarcs:
> 
>   http://tortoisedarcs.sourceforge.net
> 

I do.  Not exclusively though.

>  - is the shell interface actually useful and standard enough to be
>    bearable for people who like Windows?

Yes.  Its very hand for a easy method of looking at my changes.  I bring 
up the darcs record screen which lists all the files I've changed.  Then 
I can double click on the file and it will bring up my diff viewer with 
the differences.  Currently its set to winmerge and not kdiff3 (I use 
both depending on what I'm doing).  I think it picked up that from my 
previous TortiseCVS settings.

The overview of my changes is very nice before I go and start creating 
my cherry picked patches.

Which brings me to the one feature that I _really_ miss.  It won't do 
cherry picking.  When you record changes for a file its all or nothing.

It should be said that being a Linux hack first and a Windows user 2nd I 
_like_ the command line but there are some operations that are IMHO 
better in a full screen type setup.

Side by side comparisons of source files is one of them.  kdiff and 
winmerge provide a much better view of my changes than the command line 
output does.

An ncurses based diff however might be a good substitute.  Does such a 
beast exist?

>  - why is the download a bloody 10 megs?  (is that 10 megs compressed?)

Not totally sure but I think it due to darcs+kdiff3+putty+tortoise.  My 
directory also show 2 copies of darcs.

Yes its compressed. My extracted dir is 27Megs.  Interesting enough the 
largest file in the dist is darcs.exe at 6 Megs.

>  - are the Darcs/Putty/kdiff3 binaries included reliable?

Previously there were some custom mods that go into the darcs version 
and I had some issue with the included version of darcs crashing on 
certain operations but the last round of things are holding up quite 
stable for me.

>  Does the
>    Darcs binary include libcurl support?

This I don't know.  I'm always using it local.  How would I check?

> If all of the above have the right answers, it might actually be
> reasonable to recommend installing TortoiseDarcs rather than the stock
> Windows version.

I would still consider TortiseDarcs a beta work and not really ready for 
full public release or recommendation to a newbe.  Its not been fully 
unCVSized and there are several annoying features when trying to use it 
to do some of the other darcs operations.

And since it won't do 100% of the darcs operations you still have to use 
the command line anyway.

I've not updated my version in months though so it may be better now. 
There's no version info on the webpage so I can't tell if there has been 
a later release than what I have.

-- 
Richard A. Smith
Bitworks, Inc