A repository consists of a working directory, which has within it a
directory called _darcs
. There must also be subdirectories within
_darcs
named current
and patches
. The current
directory contains the version of the tree which has been recorded, while
patches
contains the actual patches which are in the repository.
Also within _darcs
is the inventory
file, which lists all the
patches that are in the repo. Moreover, it also gives the order of the
representation of the patches as they are stored. Given a source of patches,
i.e. any other set of repositories which have between them all the patches
contained in a given repo, that repo can be reproduced based on only the
information in the inventory
file. Under those circumstances, the
order of the patches specified in the inventory
file would be
unimportant, as this order is only needed to provide context for the
interperetation of the stored patches in this repository.
There is a very special patch which may be stored in patches
which
is called `pending'. This patch describes any changes which have not yet
been recorded, and cannot be determined by a simple diff. For example file
additions or renames are placed in pending until they are recorded.
Similarly, token replaces are stored in pending until they are recorded.
The _darcs
directory also contains a directory called
``prefs
'', which is described in Chapter 4.
Isaac Jones 2004-04-12