aptitude goes distributed

As I've hinted at in a few recent emails to the BTS, I've moved the HEAD of aptitude development to the distributed revision control system darcs. In my case, the draw is not so much being able to coordinate a large developer pool; the main advantages of darcs are that (a) it has sane branching and merging (as opposed to, say, SVN), and (b) I get disconnected operation for free (highly useful when your main development machine is a laptop).

Oh, and distributed revision control is New And Shiny[tm]. That too.

The new repository can be fetched with the following command:

darcs get http://people.debian.org/~dburrows/darcs/aptitude

Once you've checked out the source, you can use it the same way you'd use the Subversion source tree. To merge any new patches from my public tree into your local tree, run:

darcs pull

Now, the fun thing about darcs is that the checkout you just made is also a perfectly fine repository. So, for instance, if you make some changes, you can run

darcs record

in your copy of the repository. When you finish answering the prompts, your repository will now have an extra patch committed. You can now push it to other repositories, let other people pull it (if your repository is public), or email it using

darcs send

If you have a working sendmail setup, this will use it to send me a patch. If not, you can either pass --sendmail-command to "send", or use

darcs whatsnew

to see what you've changed.