Darcs Workflow: Completely Distributed Pull-Only Workflow

I'm writing this as a a rough for potential rewriting for the darcs wiki section on workflows. My post on getting the most out of Darcs 2, through feedback on the darcs mailing list has actually been rewritten into patches for the official manual of darcs. When those get accepted it will mark my first official contribution to the darcs repository, which is pretty cool.

One of the fascinating things about a DVCS is that first D, distributed. There are models for working with source control opened up by a good DVCS that would have been unimaginable under a centralized system. It's still hard to advocate them to users because they sometimes take a mental leap that sometimes seems unmanageable. I'm personally fascinated by these sorts of workflows and I think that darcs is still the best of breed when it comes to allowing projects to experiment with them.

I don't know of any group currently doing fully distributed development with darcs (however, I'd be happy to hear comments about such development), but I use partly-distributed development on my own projects and with darcs there are lessons here that apply to even partly-distributed development.

I will use http URIs because it is very easy to set up a simple web server solely for read-only file sharing on every developer's machine, in any operating system environment. I'll use three example developers on local hostnames generically named deva, devb and devc. The basic theory is that each developer keeps at least one private working repository for the project and one special public repository for the project accessible via http. I'll use the generic name project for an example project, thus the public repository for deva for this project will be available at http://deva ...