Finally, I’ve released darcs-buildpackage, a system for using Darcs to track the history of Debian packages. Now I can convert the last of my Arch repositories to Darcs.
I wrote darcs-buildpackage in Haskell. It took about half the number of lines of code that tla-buildpackage required in Python.
Are these version control systems that different that it required the whole re-implementation?
It’s a bit pitty to see that different version control systems have diffrent “levels” of corresponding “*-buildpackage” systems.
To do this right, one usually uses branching and merging features of the different VC systems. These are probably the most widely divergent between all of them, as there are some radically different philosophies between them.
darcs is probably most similar to Arch. I wrote tla-buildpackage for Arch, so I have a little insight into that question.
The basic logic of a program like this is simple: you import stuff and you check stuff out.
The stuff that makes up the guts of the program are things like poking about in repositories to see what’s there, issuing the exact correct commands to carry out each action, etc.
So really, the part that takes most of the work is the part that’s specific to each system anyway. Having a common infrastructure would probably complicate rather than simplify.
Besides, I wanted to try out Haskell for this project :-)