Darcs 2.3 beta 1

I’d like to announce immediate availability of a first beta release of darcs 2.3. There is a number of improvements and bugfixes over the last stable release (2.2). Moreover, work has been done on performance of “darcs whatsnew” for large repositories. This has also introduced a slight risk of regressions, but please note, that all of the disruptive changes are in read-only code paths: the new code will never touch your repository, so it is unable to cause permanent harm. The worst that could happen is that you get no or bad diff from “darcs whatsnew”. (This is also a reason why we need your testing!)

There is only a single installation package for this release of darcs: cabalised source. (Please note that the final version with also come with the legacy autoconf-based buildsystem, for the last time.)

You can either download a tarball from http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.2.98.1.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 (the beta release is now available on Hackage):

    $ cabal update
    $ cabal install darcs-beta

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

(Note: The package name on Hackage is different, since people installing darcs from Hackage are expecting a stable version. The name change means that you cannot use the Hackage version to build other packages that depend on the darcs library: you either need the tarball for this, or you can use the stable version from Hackage.)

There is a quick (possibly incomplete) list of important changes:

and there is a number of issues that has been resolved since 2.2: