Re: [Help-smalltalk] Using version control locally with the GST source tree

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Krishna-

Thanks for the suggestion; I just tried darcs (under Debian) with 
something smaller than GST for a first test (A Little Smalltalk, the Java 
version) and it works pretty nice.
  $ cd SmallWorld
  $ darcs init
  $ darcs add -r *"
  $ darcs record -am "Initial Import."
Kind of like SVN without the need for a central server.

Made a few changes and did more "darcs record" commands. Then to make a 
test safe copy (until reboot :-) I made a /tmp/test1 directory, did a 
"darcs init" in it, then did a
"darcs push /tmp/test1" from the original directory.
And made some more changes and did another "darcs push" and it only sent 
the new changes. Nice!

I can see how using ssh transparently would be great for minimizing 
configuring a server process or your firewall to allow more ports, so you 
could have a common copy on a file server somewhere). And if one uses the 
SVN model of directories of tagged versions, you might still be able to 
use SVN branch conventions -- though I suspect darcs copies of files 
across versions (patches) are not that lightweight (unlike SVN)?
I certainly did wrestle a lot with SVN and my system to get it installed.

I haven't tried the eclipsedarcs plugin yet though, or merging, or trying 
to look at all the versions of a single file, etc. In general I am curious 
how easy it is to use some sort of GUI (like an Eclipse plugin?) to 
"browse" a repository of Darcs changes?

Still, whether it does those things well or not, I can see darcs is (in 
theory) the single easiest way I've seen so far to take something like the 
entire GST build tree and be able to roll it back to a known state and 
also see what an operation like a "make" changes. And then (in theory) to 
manage having many copies of GST, one per application, while still 
tracking a central GST maintained by a community. Something like darcs 
used commonly with something like GST could then (in theory) spawn quite a 
community developing Smalltalk-based applications involving building up 
the base while building down the application to meet in the middle (as 
Paul Graham suggests in the previously linked article). Smalltalk invites 
that sort of work, and tools like darcs (or SVN) make that process more 
manageable. And using a text-file based approach, like GST is based 
around, certainly makes this more feasible; not that there aren't other 
image-based tool to do this in Smalltalk, but here it seems like you are 
getting something well supported for free, as long as its model seems good 
enough. I'd be more convinced this would work well if there was some 
integrated was in GST to automatically write out an image as a source code 
file (or files) for rebuilding the image, like I did with the PatqaPata 
project for Python/Jython. But I guess you can do it manually with class 
exports?

One gotcha was that darcs did not want to import certain files which it 
found uninteresting by default (like *.class files, and the I would assume 
GST *.a and *.o files?), but I assume there is a way around that? Normally 
I probably would not care much or want to archive these (so the default is 
helpful), but in this case I was specifically exploring what GST did to 
itself when make was run. I'm still wrestling with how the ANTLR plugin 
for Eclipse marking the output as "derived" and then the SVN plugin does 
not want to check those files in -- where the output (generated parsers) 
is something I really want to store. :-)

And also, when I added a file it ignored in in when I did a "darcs 
whatsnew". I had to rereun "darcs add * -r" explicitely to get it to 
notice the changes. But now I know. :-) So probably still several little 
thigns to learn.

Thanks again for the mention of darcs. Definitely something potentially 
useful for every GST developer and with a fairly small learning curve and 
a very easy install.

--Paul Fernhout

Krishna wrote:
> On 12/8/06, Brad Watson <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > Good idea:  I've borrowed it for myself.
>
> Yes. I've been doing this with other pieces of software. But instead
> of SVN I use darcs.
>
> Cheers,