[development] SCM tools

[Gordon Heydon]

Hi,

With all this talk about different scm's. I have been using darcs
(darcs.net) and I use it for a number of projects.

Basically darcs is a distributed similar to bzr or git. I find that it
works well, and has a number of features that I like, such as patch
picking (means you can select which patches you take) and when you are
recording a change set you can pick what changes are going to be
included into the patch.

Using tailor I have gone one step further and I have set up a darcs
drupal repository which people can download from. To get the cvs version
of drupal you can execute the following command.

darcs get --partial http://repos.heydon.com.au/drupal

this will get the latest version of the drupal repository. 

I have set it up so this repository will be synced with the drupal cvs
repository every 6 hours.

To update you local repository you just do the following in the drupal
directory

darcs pull -a

and it will download all the new patches that have been applied.

When you have made changes to your copy of drupal you can then do a

darcs whatsnew

and it will show you all the changes, and to record these use the
following

darcs record

and you can then choose which changes will be included in the patch.

I also have the web frontend going which can be gotten to at the
following.

http://repos.heydon.com.au/darcsweb/darcsweb.cgi?r=drupal;a=summary

which is a little ugly at the moment as tailor doesn't really look that
nice. There is also some problem ATM with the web frontend, but I think
this is because of the version of python or something that dreamhost has
done to python.

Let me know what you think.
Gordon.