Releases/2.2

Darcs 2.2.0 announcement (2009-01-16)

Hi all!

I am happy to announce general availability of darcs 2.2.0.

Getting the release

For this release, we have decided to provide two flavours, depending on the build system used:

  1. The source tarball, <http://www.darcs.net/darcs-2.2.0.tar.gz>, which can be built using the traditional autoconf-based system. This is the fully supported version. After downloading and unpacking, you can issue:

    $ ./configure
$ make

    and possibly

    # make install

    More detailed instructions inside the tarball (file README).

    Please note that we had at least one report of build failure, with quickcheck-related message. The currently best workaround, if this happens to you, is to use the cabal version of the package instead, see below.

  2. Cabalised source. You can either download a tarball from <http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/darcs/2.2.0/darcs-2.2.0.tar.gz> and build manually (see the build instructions in README inside the tarball), or, alternatively, you can use cabal-install to obtain a copy:

    $ cabal update
$ cabal install darcs

    This will give you a darcs binary in ~/.cabal/bin – you should probably add that to your PATH.

In addition to source tarballs, we expect binary packages for various UNIX platforms will be available in due time.

For Windows users, Salvatore Insalaco has prepared a binary build, available from http://homepage.mac.com/kirby81_it/darcs/darcs-2.2.0-win1.zip. You just need to unpack the directory somewhere and add it to your path (if you like).

Moreover, an experimental TortoiseDarcs release for darcs 2 has been made available by Kari Hoijarvi <hoijarvi-at-seas-dot-wustl-dot-edu> and is looking for home. It can be found at <http://datafed.net/darcs> (unfortunately, at the time of this writing, the site seemed unreachable… If you can help with hosting, please mail Kari.)

What’s New

The summary of changes since version 2.1.2 (released last November) follows:

  • In interactive record, it is now possible to get a list of currently selected hunks (command ‘l’). (Christian Kellermann)
  • It is now possible to specify –in-reply-to when using darcs send, to generate correct references in the mail header. (Pavel Shramov)
  • New repositories with –no-pristine-tree can no longer be created. This only has effect on legacy darcs-1 repositories.
  • Improvements in Windows support. (Salvatore Insalaco)
  • Performance improvements in `darcs repair` and robustness improvements in `darcs check`. (Petr Ročkai)
  • Extensive manual and online help improvements. (Trent W. Buck)
  • Support for GHC 6.10.
  • Overhaul of the make-based build system. (Trent W. Buck)
  • Cabal is now supported as a build method for darcs. (Duncan Coutts, Petr Ročkai, Gwern Branwen)
  • First stab at libdarcs – when building through Cabal, all of darcs implementation is now exposed in modules. No API guarantees whatsoever. (Eric Kow)
  • Additions to Haddock documentation of the existing darcs modules for improved development experience.
  • Improvements in the testing infrastructure. (Christian Kellermann, Gwern Branwen)
  • Low-level optimisations in filesystem code. (Ganesh Sittampalam)
  • Numerous major and minor bug fixes, refactorings and cleanups by David Roundy, Eric Kow, Jason Dagit, Dmitry Kurochkin, Thorkil Naur, Salvatore Insalaco, Christian Kellerman, Florent Becker, Duncan Coutts, Reinier Lamers, Ganesh Sittampalam, Petr Ročkai.

And a summary of issues that have been fixed in darcs since version 2.1.2 (compiled by Thorkil Naur):

525     amend-record => darcs patches show duplicate additions
971     darcs check fails (case sensitivity on filenames)
1006    darcs check and repair do not look for adds
1043    pull => mergeAfterConflicting failed in geteff (2.0.2+)
1101    darcs send --cc recipient not included in success message
1117    Whatsnew should warn on non-recorded files
1144    Add darcs send --in-reply-to or --header "In-Reply-To: <x...@y.z>"
1165    get should print last gotten tag
1196    Asking for changes in /. of directory that doesn't exist gives changes 
in entire repo
1198    Reproducible "mergeConflictingNons failed in geteff with ix"
1199    Backup files darcs added after external merge
1223    sporadic init.sh test failure (2.1.1rc2+472)
1238    wish: darcs help setpref should list all prefs
1247    make TAGS is broken
1249    2.1.2 (+ 342 patches) local drive detection on Windows error
1272    amend-record not the same as unrecord + record
1273    renameFile: does not exist (No such file or directory)
1223    sporadic init.sh test failure (2.1.1rc2+472)

I would like to thank all contributors for making this release possible.

Future

The next release will be 2.2.1, fixing low-risk issues found in 2.2.0, or those that have been excluded for 2.2.0 due to freeze. This release will appear in two or three weeks time, depending on circumstances.

The next major release will be 2.3, due in June or July this year. The focus of this release will be new features and further work on performance. Moreover, we expect that it will use Cabal as its default build system and will make first steps towards sustainable libdarcs API.

Yours,
Petr.