Next: Best practices Up: Darcs 1.0.9 (unknown) Darcs Previous: Getting started Contents
There are several ways you can adjust darcs' behavior to suit your needs.
The first is to edit files in the _darcs/prefs/ directory of a
repository. Such configuration only applies when working with that
repository. To configure darcs on a per-user rather than per-repository
basis (but with essentially the same methods), you can edit (or create)
files in the ~/.darcs/ directory. Finally, the behavior of some
darcs commands can be modified by setting appropriate environment
variables.
The _darcs directory contains a prefs directory. This
directory exists simply to hold user configuration settings specific to
this repository. The contents of this directory are intended to be
modifiable by the user, although in some cases a mistake in such a
modification may cause darcs to behave strangely.
Default values for darcs commands can be configured on a per-repository
basis by editing (and possibly creating) the _darcs/prefs/defaults
file. Each line of this file has the following form:
COMMAND FLAG VALUEwhere
COMMAND is either the name of the command to which the default
applies, or ALL to indicate that the default applies to all commands
accepting that flag. The FLAG term is the name of the long argument
option without the ``--'', i.e. verbose rather than
--verbose. Finally, the VALUE option can be omitted if the
flag is one such as verbose that doesn't involve a value.
Each line only takes one flag. To set multiple defaults for the same
command (or for ALL commands), use multiple lines.
Note that the use of ALL easily can have unpredicted consequences,
especially if commands in newer versions of darcs accepts flags that they
didn't in previous versions. A command like obliterate could be
devastating with the ``wrong'' flags (for example -all). Only use safe
flags with ALL.
~/.darcs/defaults |
provides defaults for this user account |
repo/_darcs/prefs/defaults |
provides defaults for one project, |
| overrules changes per user |
For example, if your system clock is bizarre, you could instruct darcs to
always ignore the file modification times by adding the following line to
your _darcs/prefs/defaults file. (Note that this would have to be
done for each repository!)
ALL ignore-times
If you never want to run a test when recording to a particular repository
(but still want to do so when running
check on that repository), and like to name
all your patches ``Stupid patch'', you could use the following:
record no-test record patch-name Stupid patch
If you would like a command to be run every time patches are recorded in a particular repository (for example if you have one central repository, that all developers contribute to), then you can set apply to always run a command when apply is successful. For example, if you need to make sure that the files in the repository have the correct access rights you might use the following. There are two things to note about using darcs this way:
darcs add; doing so would
allow people to modify that file and then run arbitrary scripts on
your main repository, possibly damaging or violating security.
apply posthook chmod -R a+r * apply run-posthook
There are some options which are meant specifically for use in
_darcs/prefs/defaults. One of them is --disable. As the name
suggests, this option will disable every command that got it as argument. So,
if you are afraid that you could damage your repositories by inadvertent use of
a command like amend-record, add the following line to
_darcs/prefs/defaults:
amend-record disable
Also, a global preferences file can be created with the name
.darcs/defaults in your home directory. Options present there will
be added to the repository-specific preferences.
If they conflict with repository-specific options, the repository-specific
ones will take precedence.
_darcs/prefs/repos file contains a list of repositories you have
pulled from or pushed to, and is used for autocompletion of pull and push
commands in bash. Feel free to delete any lines from this list that might
get in there, or to delete the file as a whole.
_darcs/prefs/author file contains the email address (or name) to
be used as the author when patches are recorded in this repository,
e.g. David Roundy <droundy@abridgegame.org>. This
file overrides the contents of the environment variables
$DARCS_EMAIL and $EMAIL.
_darcs/prefs/boring file may contain a list of regular
expressions describing files, such as object files, that you do not expect
to add to your project. As an example, the boring file that I use with
my darcs repository is:
\.hi$ \.o$ ^\.[^/] ^_ ~$ (^|/)CVS($|/)A newly created repository has a longer boring file that includes many common source control, backup, temporary, and compiled files.
You may want to have the boring file under version
control. To do this you can use darcs setpref to set the value
``boringfile'' to the name of your desired boring file
(e.g. darcs setpref boringfile .boring, where .boring
is the repository path of a file
that has been
darcs added to your repository). The boringfile preference overrides
_darcs/prefs/boring, so be sure to copy that file to the boringfile.
You can also set up a ``boring'' regexps
file in your home directory, named ~/.darcs/boring, which will be
used with all of your darcs repositories.
Any file whose repository path (such as manual/index.html) matches any of
the boring regular expressions is considered boring. The boring file is
used to filter the files provided to darcs add, to allow you to use a
simple darcs add newdir newdir/*
without accidentally adding a bunch of
object files. It is also used when the --look-for-adds flag is
given to whatsnew or record.
_darcs/prefs/binaries file may contain a list of regular
expressions describing files that should be treated as binary files rather
than text files. You probably will want to have the binaries file under
version control. To do this you can use darcs setpref to set the value
``binariesfile'' to the name of your desired binaries file
(e.g. darcs setpref binariesfile ./.binaries, where
.binaries is a file that has been
darcs added to your repository). As with the boring file, you can also set
up a ~/.darcs/binaries file if you like.
_darcs/prefs/email file is used to provide the e-mail address for your
repository that others will use when they darcs send a patch back to you.
The contents of the file should simply be an e-mail address.
_darcs/prefs/motd file may contain a ``message of the day''
which will be displayed to users who get or pull from the repository without the
--quiet option.
There are a few environment variables whose contents affect darcs' behavior.
_darcs/prefs/author exists. If
DARCS_EMAIL is undefined, the contents of the EMAIL environment variable
are used.
vi, emacs, emacs -nw and
nano in that order.
more.
/tmp and if /tmp doesn't exist,
it'll put the temporaries in _darcs.
This is very helpful, for example, when recording with a test suite that
uses MPI, in which case using /tmp to hold the test copy is no good,
as /tmp isn't shared over NFS and thus the mpirun call will
fail, since the binary isn't present on the compute nodes.
$HOME/.darcs.
user@foo.org:foo or foo.org:foo. Darcs will use
scp to copy single files (e.g. repository meta-information), and sftp
to copy multiple files in batches (e.g. patches). These commands are
not interpreted by a shell, so you cannot use shell
metacharacters, and the first word in the command must be the name of
an executable located in your path. By default, scp and sftp
are used. When you can use sftp, but not scp (e.g. some ISP web sites), it
works to set DARCS_SCP to `sftp'. The other way around does not work, i.e.
DARCS_FTP must reference an sftp program, not scp.
This method overrides all other ways of getting foo://xxx URLs.
Note that each command should be constructed so that it sends the downloaded content to STDOUT, and the next argument to it should be the URL. Here are some examples that should work for DARCS_GET_HTTP:
fetch -q -o - curl -s -f lynx -source wget -q -O -
If set, DARCS_MGET_FOO will be used to fetch many files from a single repository simultaneously. Replace FOO and foo as appropriate to handle other URL schemes. These commands are not interpreted by a shell, so you cannot use shell metacharacters, and the first word in the command must be the name of an executable located in your path. The GET command will be called with a URL for each file. The MGET command will be invoked with a number of URLs and is expected to download the files to the current directory, preserving the file name but not the path. The APPLY command will be called with a darcs patchfile piped into its standard input. Example:
wget -q
The DARCS_WGET environment variable defines the command that darcs will use to fetch all URLs for remote repositories. The first word in the command must be the name of an executable located in your path. Extra arguments can be included as well, such as:
wget -q
Darcs will append -i to the argument list, which it uses to provide a
list of URLS to download. This allows wget to download multiple patches at the
same time. It's possible to use another command besides wget with this
environment variable, but it must support the -i option in the same way.
These commands are not interpreted by a shell, so you cannot use shell meta-characters.
If the terminal understands ANSI color escape sequences,
darcs will highlight certain keywords and delimiters when printing patches.
This can be turned off by setting the environment variable DARCS_DONT_COLOR to 1.
If you use a pager that happens to understand ANSI colors, like less -R,
darcs can be forced always to highlight the output
by setting DARCS_ALWAYS_COLOR to 1.
If you can't see colors you can set DARCS_ALTERNATIVE_COLOR to 1,
and darcs will use ANSI codes for bold and reverse video instead of colors.
By default darcs will escape (by highlighting if possible) any kind of spaces at the end of lines when showing patch contents. If you don't want this you can turn it off by setting DARCS_DONT_ESCAPE_TRAILING_SPACES to 1. A special case exists for only carriage returns: DARCS_DONT_ESCAPE_TRAILING_CR.
Darcs needs to escape certain characters when printing patch contents to a terminal. Characters like backspace can otherwise hide patch content from the user, and other character sequences can even in some cases redirect commands to the shell if the terminal allows it.
By default darcs will only allow printable 7-bit ASCII characters (including space),
and the two control characters tab and newline.
(See the last paragraph in this section for a way to tailor this behavior.)
All other octets are printed in quoted form (as
Darcs has some limited support for locales.
If the system's locale is a single-byte character encoding,
like the Latin encodings,
you can set the environment variable DARCS_DONT_ESCAPE_ISPRINT to 1
and darcs will display all the printables in the current system locale
instead of just the ASCII ones.
NOTE: This curently does not work on some architectures if darcs is
compiled with GHC 6.4. Some non-ASCII control characters might be printed
and can possibly spoof the terminal.
For multi-byte character encodings things are less smooth.
UTF-8 will work if you set DARCS_DONT_ESCAPE_8BIT to 1,
but non-printables outside the 7-bit ASCII range are no longer escaped.
E.g., the extra control characters from Latin-1
might leave your terminal at the mercy of the patch contents.
Space characters outside the 7-bit ASCII range are no longer recognized
and will not be properly escaped at line endings.
As a last resort you can set DARCS_DONT_ESCAPE_ANYTHING to 1.
Then everything that doesn't flip code sets should work,
and so will all the bells and whistles in your terminal.
This environment variable can also be handy
if you pipe the output to a pager or external filter
that knows better than darcs how to handle your encoding.
Note that all escaping,
including the special escaping of any line ending spaces,
will be turned off by this setting.
There are two environment variables you can set
to explicitly tell darcs to not escape or escape octets.
They are
DARCS_DONT_ESCAPE_EXTRA and DARCS_ESCAPE_EXTRA.
Their values should be strings consisting of the verbatim octets in question.
The do-escapes take precedence over the dont-escapes.
Space characters are still escaped at line endings though.
The special environment variable DARCS_DONT_ESCAPE_TRAILING_CR
turns off escaping of carriage return last on the line (DOS style).
^<control letter> or \