Darcs 2.3.0
I’d like to announce immediate availability of a new stable release of darcs, 2.3.0. There is a number of improvements and bugfixes over the previous stable release, 2.2. Moreover, work has been done to improve performance of “darcs whatsnew” for large repositories.
As in the past, there are two source tarballs available. As of this release, the cabal-based build is preferred, and the autoconf build is deprecated. You can obtain the source tarballs at these addresses:
- http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.3.0.tar.gz
- http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.3.0_autoconf.tar.gz
The build instructions are available in the enclosed README file in those tarballs.
Moreover, if you have cabal-install available, you can install latest stable release of darcs by issuing the following commands (no tarballs needed):
$ cabal update
$ cabal install darcs
This should give you a darcs binary in ~/.cabal/bin — you should probably
add this to your PATH. More detailed instructions for installing on Windows are
available near the end of this announcement.
What’s New
This is a summary of important changes since the last stable release (2.2):
- Lots and lots of documentation changes (Trent).
- Haskeline improvements (Judah).
- Cabal as default buildsystem (many contributors).
- Fixes in darcs check/repair memory usage (Bertram, David).
- Performance improvement in subtree record (Reinier).
- New option: —summary —xml (Florian Gilcher).
- New option: changes —max-count (Eric and Petr).
- Fix changes —only-to-files for renames (Dmitry).
- Performance fix in “darcs changes” (Benedikt).
- Hardlinks on NTFS (Salvatore).
- Coalesce more changes when creating rollbacks (David).
- New unit test runner (Reinier).
- Inclusion of darcs-shell in contrib (László, Trent).
- Author name/address canonisation: .authorspellings (Simon).
- Working directory index and substantial “darcs wh” optimisation (Petr).
- New command: “darcs show index” (Petr).
- Gzip CRC check and repair feature (Ganesh).
A number of issues has been resolved since 2.2 as well. See http://bugs.darcs.net/issueN for details on bug number N.
- 948 darcsman (Trent)
- 1206 countable nouns (Trent)
- 1285 cabal test v. cabal clean (Trent)
- 1302 use resolved, not resolved-in-unstable (Trent)
- 1235 obliterate —summary (Rob)
- 1270 no MOTD for —xml-output (Lele)
- 1311 cover more timezones (Dave)
- 1292 re-encoding haskeline input (Judah)
- 1313 clickable ToC and refs in PDF manual Trent)
- 1310 create merged \darcsCommand{add} (Trent)
- 1333 better “cannot push to current repository” warning (Petr)
- 1347 (autoconf) check for unsafeMMapFile if mmap use enabled (Dave)
- 1361 specify required includes for curl in cabal file (Reinier)
- 1379 remove libwww support (Trent)
- 1366 remove unreachable code for direct ncurses use (Trent)
- 1271 do not install two copies of darcs.pdf (Trent)
- 1358 encode non-ASCII characters in mail headers (Reinier)
- 1393 swap “darcs mv” and “darcs move” (Trent)
- 1405 improve discoverability of global author file (Trent)
- 1402 don’t “phone home” about bugs (Trent)
- 1301 remove obsolete zsh completion scripts (Trent)
- 1162 makeAbsolute is now a total function (Ben F)
- 1269 setpref predist - exitcode ignored bug (Ben M)
- 1415 —edit-long-comment, not —edit-description, in help (Trent)
- 1413 remove duplicate documentation (Trent)
- 1423 complain about empty add/remove (Trent)
- 1437 Implement darcs changes —max-count (Eric)
- 1430 lazy pattern matching in (-:-) from Changes command module (Dmitry)
- 1434 refactor example test (Trent)
- 1432 refer to %APPDATA%, not %USERPROFILE% (Trent)
- 1186 give a chance to abort if user did not edit description file (Dmitry)
- 1446 make amend-record -m foo replace only the patch name (Dmitry)
- 1435 default to get —hashed from a darcs-1.0 source (Trent)
- 1312 update and reduce build notes (Trent)
- 1351 fix repository path handling on Windows (Salvatore)
- 1173 support hard links on NTFS (Salvatore)
- 1248 support compressed inventories for darcs-1 repos (Ganesh)
- 1455 implement “darcs help environment” (Trent)
The question of GHC 6.8
Using GHC 6.10.3 or newer is strongly recommended. You may compile darcs with GHC 6.8, but there are several caveats. If you are using 6.8.2 or older, please disable mmap support (pass -f-mmap to cabal install or runghc Setup configure). Note that the GHC 6.8.2 that ships with Debian Lenny is not affected and it should be safe to keep mmap enabled. It is also recommended to disable use of Hackage zlib when compiling with GHC 6.8.2 (including the Debian Lenny version): pass -f-zlib to cabal. When using zlib, we have seen occasional crashes with error messages like “openBinaryFile: file locked” — this is a known GHC 6.8.2 bug (and is fixed in GHC 6.8.3). Last, if you are using a 64-bit system, darcs may hang when you exit a pager when compiled with GHC older than 6.10.3. Although this is harmless, it is quite inconvenient.
Overall, the status of GHC 6.8 is “semi-supported”: for many cases, things will work just fine, especially if you take a little extra caution with compilation flags.
Installing on Windows
To install darcs on Windows systems from scratch, please download the Haskell Platform and MSYS:
- http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/2009.2.0.1/HaskellPlatform-2009.2.0.1-setup.exe
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MSYS+Base+System/MSYS-1.0.11-rc-1.exe/download
After installing both, you should have an “MSYS” icon: run MSYS and in the
terminal window type (the $ character denotes the prompt, do not repeat it):
$ cabal update
$ cabal install darcs -f-curl
This should download, compile and install all required dependencies and also darcs itself. The resulting darcs executable will be placed into the Haskell Platform executables folder, and should be accessible from the MSYS shell (just type “darcs —version” to check).