[darcs-users] nul file in darcs repo

[Alan Bram]

I'm sure this is a highly unorthodox suggestion, but here goes ...

I have a quick-and-dirty little program that reads darcs' internal
patch files, and applies each of the changes, and then records them.
In a way, it's kind of a little darcs "replayer".

Currently, it "records" the changes by invoking Subversion, because my
goal was to convert to Subversion.  But I guess you could easily hack
it to do "darcs record" instead.

Then just add a special little hack to the program to watch for the
addition of the "nul" file, and just skip over it.  Thus you could
recreate a fresh new copy of the repo, by replaying all of history,
except for the part you want to elide.

This is admittedly a naive approach, but it has worked for me, and
took much less time than even just reading the darcs manual.

If you're interested, I'd be happy to share this program with you
(with no warranty, of course, licensed under GPL, let's say).  Just
let me know.


Cheers,
 - arb

> we have a problem checking out a darcs repository under windows.
> Our repository contains a (rather useless) file called nul .
> This file was added to the initial version of the repo,
> so the addfile command is in patch 1.
> We've tried to check out this repo with "darcs get" under
> windows xp and cygwin. There darcs stops checking out
> when trying to create the file called nul . The reason is,
> that under windows nul is not a legal file name.
> 
> How can we remove that entry from our repo
> or manipulate the repo, without
> throwing away the whole history in a way, that we
> can check out under windows?