A repository consists of a working directory, which has within it a
directory called _darcs
. There must also be subdirectories within
_darcs
named current
and patches
. The current
directory contains the version of the tree which has been recorded, while
patches
contains the actual patches which are in the repository.
Also within _darcs
is the inventory
file, which lists all the
patches that are in the repo. Moreover, it also gives the order of the
representation of the patches as they are stored. Given a source of patches,
i.e. any other set of repositories which have between them all the patches
contained in a given repo, that repo can be reproduced based on only the
information in the inventory
file. Under those circumstances, the
order of the patches specified in the inventory
file would be
unimportant, as this order is only needed to provide context for the
interperetation of the stored patches in this repository.
There is a very special patch which may be stored in patches
which
is called `pending'. This patch describes any changes which have not yet
been recorded, and cannot be determined by a simple diff. For example file
additions or renames are placed in pending until they are recorded.
Similarly, token replaces are stored in pending until they are recorded.
The _darcs
directory will also typically contain a prefs
directory. This directory exists simply to hold user configuration
settings specific to this repository. The contents of this directory are
intended to be modifiable by the user, although a mistake in such a
modification may cause darcs to behave strangely.
Default values for darcs commands can be configured on a per-repository
basis by editing (and possibly creating) the _darcs/prefs/defaults
file. Each line of this file has the following form:
COMMAND FLAG VALUEwhere
COMMAND
is either the name of the command to which the default
applies, or ALL
to indicate that the default applies to all commands
accepting that flag. The FLAG
term is the name of the long argument
option without the ``--
'', i.e. verbose
rather than
--verbose
. Finally, the VALUE
option can be omitted if the
flag is one such as verbose
that doesn't involve a value.
For example, if your system clock is bizarre, you could instruct darcs to
always ignore the file modification times by adding the following line to
your _darcs/prefs/defaults
file. (Note that this would have to be
done for each repository!)
ALL ignore-times
If you never want to run a test when recording to a particular repository (but still want to do so when running check on that repo), and like to name all your patches ``Stupid patch'', you could use the following:
record no-test record patch-name Stupid patch
Also, a global preferences file can be created with the name
.darcs/defaults
in your home directory. Options present there will
be added to the repository-specific preferences.
_darcs/prefs/repos
file contains a list of repositories you have
pulled from or pushed to, and is used for autocompletion of pull and push
commands in bash. Feel free to delete any lines from this list that might
get in there, or to delete the file as a whole.
_darcs/prefs/author
file contains the email address (or name) to
be used as the author when patches are recorded in this repository. This
file overrides the contents of the environment variables
$DARCS_EMAIL
and $EMAIL
.
_darcs/prefs/boring
file may contain a list of regular
expressions describing files, such as object files, that you do not expect
to add to your project. As an example, the boring file that I use with
my darcs repository is:
\.hi$ \.o$ ^\.[^/] ^_ ~$ (^|/)CVS($|/)The last line is actually irrelevant because I don't use CVS, but if I did it would be handy. You may want to have the boring file under version control. To do this you can use darcs setpref to set the value ``boringfile'' to the name of your desired boring file (e.g. ``darcs setpref boringfile ./.boring'', where the .boring is a file that has been darcs added to your repository). You can also set up a ``boring'' regexps file in your home directory, named
~/.darcs/boring
, which will be
used with all of your darcs repositories.
Any file whose full path (such as manual/index.html
) matches any of
the boring regular expressions is considered boring. The boring file is
used to filter the files provided to darcs add, to allow you to use a
simple ``darcs add newdir newdir/*'' without accidentally adding a bunch of
object files. It is also used when the --look-for-adds
flag is
given to whatsnew or record.
_darcs/prefs/binaries
file may contain a list of regular
expressions describing files that should be treated as binary files rather
than text files. You probably will want to have the binaries file under
version control. To do this you can use darcs setpref to set the value
``binariesfile'' to the name of your desired binaries file (e.g. ``darcs
setpref binariesfile ./.binaries'', where .binaries is a file that has been
darcs added to your repository). As with the boring file, you can also set
up a ~/.darcs/binaries
file if you like.