darcs switchover

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

Malcolm.Wallace:
> "Simon Marlow" <simonmar at microsoft.com> writes:
> 
> > The aim is to eventually switch over to using darcs for our revision
> > control.  The point of this message is to find out what constraints
> > people have that will affect when we can throw the switch.
> 
> One thing it occurs to me to ask is what will be happening to CVS
> commit messages, once the switchover to darcs happens?
> 
> I have investigated this briefly, and it seems that darcs does not
> yet directly support mailing out commit messages from a repository.
> There is a wrapper script at
>     darcs get http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/darcs-mail
> but this requires administration privileges on the hosting machine,
> since you need to rename the darcs binary proper, then install the
> wrapper in its place.  Also, it is unclear to me whether this wrapper
> works equally well in all situations, e.g. with 'darcs apply' on the
> hosting machine, 'darcs push' from a separate repository on the same
> host, or 'darcs push' from a remote machine with ssh.
> 
> Anyone sufficiently familiar with this to shed any light?

darcs-mail mails changes summaries when `apply --all' is on the cmd line
-- which is the case when pushing over ssh. So it works quite nicely for
the situation where you push over ssh to a central repository. A nice
summary is then sent out to each address in _darcs/prefs/mailinglist.
We've used this internally at UNSW for about 6 months now, and has
worked quite well.

I originally wrote this script as a temporary fix until darcs supported
post-apply hooks. If it does now, perhaps there's no need for the
wrapper, and instead a mail program can be invoked by darcs itself as a
hook (i.e. just the core of darcs-mail can be `hooked').

So, in summary, if darcs post-apply hooks now work, we could strip down
darcs-mail for our purposes, otherwise we could use darcs-mail, (though
it only works over darcs push ssh atm).

-- Don