We have decided to delay the release cycle slightly for 2.3 and release another beta. The primary reason for this is our Windows support — I would like to invite all Windows users to install darcs-beta and give it a ride. If you have a working cabal-install, all you need to do is run:
$ cabal update
$ cabal install darcs-beta
(this works on all platforms; you may need to use -f-curl, if you don’t have the cURL headers available — this is often the case on Windows). If you do not have cabal-install, please follow the instructions near the end of this message, “Installing on Windows”.
In addition to using cabal-install, you can also download a tarball from http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.2.98.4.tar.gz and build manually (see the build instructions in README inside the tarball).
Feedback
To make the darcs 2.3 release a good one, we still need testing feedback: please drop a note to darcs-users@ if you have installed darcs-beta, or failed to install it. If you run into any bugs, we need to know about them.
Thanks!
The question of GHC 6.8
Using GHC 6.10.3 or newer is strongly recommended. You may compile darcs with GHC 6.8, but there are several caveats. If you are using 6.8.2 or older, please disable mmap support (pass -f-mmap to cabal install or runghc Setup configure below). Note that the GHC 6.8.2 that ships with Debian Lenny is not affected and it should be safe to keep mmap enabled. It is also recommended to disable use of Hackage zlib when compiling with GHC 6.8.2 (including the Debian Lenny version): pass -f-zlib to cabal. When using zlib, we have seen occasional crashes with error messages like “openBinaryFile: file locked” — this is a known GHC 6.8.2 bug (and is fixed in GHC 6.8.3). Last, if you are using a 64-bit system, darcs may hang when you exit a pager when compiled with GHC older than 6.10.3. Although this is harmless, it is quite inconvenient.
Overall, the status of GHC 6.8 is “semi-supported”: for many cases, things will work just fine, especially if you take a little extra caution with compilation flags.
Installing on Windows
To install darcs on Windows systems from scratch, please download the Haskell Platform and MSYS:
- http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/2009.2.0.1/HaskellPlatform-2009.2.0.1-setup.exe
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MSYS+Base+System/MSYS-1.0.11-rc-1.exe/download
After installing both, you should have an “MSYS” icon: run MSYS and in the terminal window type:
$ cabal update
$ cabal install darcs-beta -f-curl
This should download, compile and install all required dependencies and darcs-beta itself. The resulting darcs executable will be placed into the Haskell Platform executables folder, and should be accessible from the MSYS shell (just type “darcs —version” to check).
