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Subsections

Repository formats

Introduction

Darcs 2 introduces a couple of new repository formats and this chapter is intended to serve as brief introduction to them and as an overview of inter-operation between them.

Darcs 1 format

Darcs 1 format is the only format supported by 1.0.x versions of darcs. Darcs 2 is capable of entirely interacting with darcs 1 format and still defaults to darcs 1 format, but to take full advantage of new capabilities of darcs 2 it be will necessary to upgrade to the newer formats.

Hashed format

Hashed repository format is an intermediate format that interoperates well with darcs 1 repositories. Darcs 2 can push/pull between darcs 1 format and hashed format repositories and can easily convert from one to the other. Among its benefits, one of the most user obvious changes is that the hashed format provides a more robust pristine format, that is less susceptible to corruption from IDEs and automated tools.

Hashed format is recommend for all repositories used with darcs 2 that need to interoperate with darcs 1 branches or darcs 1 developers. To get the most out of hashed format usage it is recommended to enable a global cache.

To convert an existing darcs 1 repository to hashed format simply get a new copy with the hashed flag:

$ darcs get --hashed old-repo new-repo

Darcs 2 format

Darcs 2 format is the successor to darcs 1 format. It makes use of the various improvements of the hashed repository format, with additional benefits including an increased efficiency and robustness when dealing with conflicting patches.

Darcs 2 format is recommended for projects that do not need to interoperate with darcs 1 repositories or developers with versions of darcs less than 2.0.0 installed. To get the most out of darcs 2 format usage it is recommended to enable a global cache.

Initialize a new repository in darcs 2 format:

$ darcs init --darcs-2

Projects in darcs 1 format ready to move all development to darcs 2 can convert an existing repository to darcs 2 format. This should be done only once per family tree of related repositories, as converting each branch separately may result in inter-repository corruption that can lead to subtle and hard to diagnose problems when attempting to exchange patches between seperately converted repositories. The recommendation is to convert the branch of a project with the largest superset of patches in the project and then recreate the branches from this superset repository via darcs get, particularly with the usage of its selection flags such as --context, --tag and --to-match, and darcs obliterate, which can be used to interactively remove patches that are not intended in the recreated branch.

The command for conversion:

$ darcs convert d1repo d2repo


next up previous contents
Next: Darcs commands Up: Darcs 2.1.2 (release) Darcs Previous: Best practices   Contents
2008-12-26