Thomas Schwinge

darcs in a Nutshell

Using darcs as my revision control suite of choice, I'll give a short and purposive introduction in using it here, so that you'll be able to fetch and help to improve my software packages.


For the whole story, please have a look at darcs's manual and the other resources available from darcs's homepage.
The darcs wiki also is a valuable source of information.


Say, you want to contribute to my collection of snippets for sp-foreign (or just use them).

The snippets' repository is located at http://nic-nac-project.de/~schwinge/package/admin/spftools/snippets/.

You can browse the repository using your web browser or fetch some files using a downloading tool, modify some of them, add new files, delete others, be happy.
The other day you'll notice that I myself have modified the repository. I've added files, modified others, deleted obsolete ones.
You re-get the whole repository, compare it to your own copy, merge the changes, resolve conflicting changes, waste time.

Instead, just issue darcs get http://nic-nac-project.de/~schwinge/package/admin/spftools/snippets/ to create your very own branch of the repository in the directory snippets/.

Add new files, tell darcs about them: darcs add FILE....
Modify others to correct my errors, perhaps delete those you don't like at all.

Finally, record your changes: darcs record.
Send a patch to me: darcs send.
And hope that I will incorporate your changes.

Later, run darcs pull to see if I already accepted your suggestions, to get informed about other available patches and have them integrated into your branch of the repository without much hassle: darcs tries to resolve any occuring conflicts automagically.