There are sevaral 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.
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 repo), and like to name all your patches ``Stupid patch'', you could use the following:
record no-test record patch-name Stupid patch
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.
_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. 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($|/)The last line is actually irrelevant because I don't use CVS, but if I did it would be handy. 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 the .boring is a file that has been darcs added to your repository). 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 full 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/motd
file may a ``message of the day'' which will
be displayed to user who get or pull from the repo 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.
/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
.
This command is not interpereted 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.
If the repository is encoded in the system's locale and it is an
8-bit, single-byte encoding, (e.g. ISO 8859-1), darcs can use the library
function isPrint
to check for printable characters, including
non-ASCII. Setting the environment variable DARCS_USE_ISPRINT=1 enables
this. It does not work for multi-byte encodings like UTF-8.
Isaac Jones 2004-09-16