[darcs-users] Pushing to an FTP location

[Vyacheslav Akhmechet]

I don't understand how remote 'darcs apply' is different from a local
one. Under the hood 'apply' must use simple filesystem operations to
create, delete, and modify files. I don't see why this can't be
abstracted so that a set of actions that perform these tasks on a
remote ftp client are called instead of a set of functions that
perform these actions on a local file system.

Using darcs with NetDrive works beautifully. I want to get away from
NetDrive because it's not free, I can't easily buy it as it comes as a
part of a larget corporate lisence, and I can't use it on OS X.
Effectively NetDrive achieves the abstraction I am talking about
*outside* of 'darcs apply', it makes standard file system actions work
on a remote FTP drive. I don't see why doing this within darcs
codebase is difficult, all I have to do is call a different set of
actions. I'm going to grab the code when I get a chance and give it a
try. I'll send my progress to this list.

On 7/29/06, Peter Lund <firefly at diku.dk> wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-07-29 at 11:18 +0200, Eric Y. Kow wrote:
>
> > Perhaps a rough sketch of an idea would be based on having a local
> > mirror of the remote repository.  A remote apply would then
> > go a little like this:
> >
> > 1) Lock the remote repository
> >
> > 2) Update the mirror (pull)
> >
> > 3) Do darcs apply, but at the same time, log all the files that
> >    are modified by darcs, even/especially stuff in _darcs.
> >    It might help to distinguish between deleted and added/updated
> >    files.  Note that mv would probably have to be recorded as
> >    remove-and-add.
> >
> > 4) Using the log, update all the relevant files on the remote
> >    end.  In your case, this would consist of asking ftp to
> >    delete and upload stuff.
> >
> > 5) Unlock the remote repository
> >
> > Anybody have any other (hopefully simpler, more elegant) ideas?
>
> I have a (small) remote repository at http://vax64.dk/bælg/ and my
> hoster only allows writes via ftp (with passwords in the clear, off
> course).  The above is more or less how I push to that repository.
>
> I tried something similar to what Vyacheslaw did at first, only with
> FUSE and curlftpfs (I'm running Linux whereas Vyacheslaw is probably
> running Windows).  It was buggy /and/ it didn't understand file locking.
> Every time darcs tried to lock a file it would return an error.
>
> So now I use the attached script instead and it works perfectly.  The
> script only runs under Unix/Linux (or within cygwin) but something
> similar could easily be written for ordinary windows environments.  I
> use one of gnomevfs utilities for the copying, I bet there are similar
> kioslave utilities one could use instead.  And then there is lftp (a
> command-line FTP client) which would also work fine.
>
> My current script pretty much does what you suggest above, except:
> 1) there is no locking
> 2) everything gets copied down
> 3) there is no log
> 4) everything gets copied back (there is no log)
> 5) there is no unlocking
>
> As long as my repository is small it is a fine solution.
>
> When my repository gets bigger I'll look at optimizing it a bit.  I'm
> not going to keep a log, since it is easy to compare two directories to
> see which files are new/changed.  Sticking to one directory and
> comparing timestamps is also easy.
>
> I could also keep the "mirror" around between invocations of the script
> and just assume that nobody else changes it.  Or I could use FTP to list
> the files in _darcs/* and see if they are any new files or any with a
> changed size or timestamp.  I might even use an HTTP connection and HEAD
> requests to help (using the ETag) but that is probably overkill.
>
> All in all, I think small, incremental refinements of the darcspush
> script could get me a long way.
>
> -Peter
>
>
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