Darcs and the Useful Context File

I spend some time thinking about useful ways for representing Darcs repository states while working on my nascent Darcsforge project. I won't claim to be an expert by any means, but I do have some useful wisdom, I think. It's often necessary with a VCS to describe a particular state of the repository. You might have need to go back to that state to reproduce a bug or go forward to that state to gain a new feature or security update. In some VCSes there are simple numbers that you can use to represent a repository state, either because there is a single authority (in the case of a more traditional client-server VCS) or a "single history" (in the case of a Git or Mercurial repository having relatively more strict parentage for changesets than Darcs). Darcs is distributed, so there is no one authority to claim dominion over the state of a repository, and Darcs has a constantly twisting history of a repository's state, which gives it some nearly amazing powers of cherry picking at the expense of simple enumerations of a repository state.

There are a number of ways to communicate the state of a repository in Darcs, and often the best one to use at a the moment is sensitive to your particular needs. I realize that can be it's own challenge in a learning curve, but Darcs tries its best to be helpful all along the way. In fact, small projects can get away with using nothing but Darcs' best-of-breed interactive command line interface to get repositories into particularly useful shapes. If patches are named well, moving forward to get that new feature or security update is a just a matter of making the right choices in the interactive darcs pull. Communicating specific ...