Development/FAQ

Questions that new darcs hackers may have…

Getting started

Where I can get the a copy of the darcs development repo?

darcs clone --lazy http://darcs.net/screened

Release branches can be found under http://darcs.net/releases

How do I submit a patch for inclusion in Darcs?

See GettingStarted

I’m bored. Give me something to do.

See HowToHelp

Patches

See GettingStarted

I sent a patch and got no response!

We’re very sorry to hear that! The most likely explanation is that we did not get your patch (we do try to respond to every patch we receive, and slip-ups are rare). Have a look at our informal darcs send documentation some troubleshooting advice

Can I amend a patch I sent to the tracker?

You can only amend a patch before it has been screened. Some tricks for finding out if the patch has been screened or not:

darcs log --repo http://darcs.net/screened --match 'author Bob' -i
darcs log --repo http://darcs.net/screened --match 'name foo'

If your patch has not yet been screened, it should be fine to amend. If it already has been applied, you cannot amend, but must send a followup.

How can I replace a patch I already sent to the tracker?

First, see the question above: has your patch already been screened?

Our preferred way is just to send a reply to the original ticket. Check the Getting Started guide (search for “send”) for details.

If you’ve already sent a new patch, no problem! Just mark the old as obsoleted and add the ticket number for the new patch in its superseder field.

Test suite

Do I really have to run all those tests?

If you’re pretty sure that your modification is ok, you could do a darcs record --no-test. A useful trick if you’re working on many patches is to run darcs trackdown at the very end, when you’re ready to test them out. Keep in mind that you can also use the tests/tests_to_run mechanism to select which tests you want to run whenever you do a make test.

Should I worry about tests unexpectedly succeeding?

No. These are tests written for when certain wishlist features are implemented or bugs are corrected. If they unexpectedly succeed, it could either mean that the feature in question has been implemented (and that the test suite should be modified), or that darcs has system-specific behaviour or that there is something non-deterministic going on. (FIXME: any comments?)

How do I run a subset of tests?

cabal test tests/foo.sh tests/bar.sh

Other infrastructure

How do I edit the documentation?

The command darcs help markdown generates a reference made from the output of all commands darcs help COMMAND, plus reference about environment variables and patterns.

If what you need to document is quite small, edit directly the help output of the command you are modifying. Otherwise edit this wiki instead.

How can I play around with darcs functions and commands in GHCi?

cabal repl

Code questions

How does patch selection work?

See Patch Selection Mechanism

What is the difference between a patch set and a patch bundle, a named patch and a composite patch, etc?

See Glossary

What’s the convention for variable names, camelCase or using_underscores?

camelCase (the underscores are from older code)

Darcs does not allow tabs in Haskell code, how do I disable them in my editor?

If you use Emacs there are several ways according to Dave Love

(add-hook 'haskell-mode-hook '(lambda () (setq indent-tabs-mode nil)))

or use http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/dir-locals.el or http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/indent-tabs-maybe.el to set indent-tabs-mode locally.

See also