Sunday, September 20, 2009

darcs 2.3.1: better docs, less bugs

Dear Darcs users,


The darcs team would like to announce the immediate availability of a new stable version of darcs, 2.3.1. This is the latest development in the 2.3 branch, which brought significant performance improvements. Performance improvement continues to be a core focus of darcs development. Darcs 2.4, planned for January, will build upon the improvements in 2.3 to be even faster.

The user-visible changes in darcs 2.3.1 are:

  • Fix bugs in optimizations in 2.3.0
  • Documentation improvements
  • Remove autoconf build system

A more complete list of changes in this and older versions of darcs can be

found at http://www.darcs.net/NEWS .


Installing


You can obtain the source tarball at the following address:

The build instructions are available in the enclosed README file in this tarball. Moreover, if you have cabal-install available, you can install latest stable release of darcs by issuing the following commands (no tarballs needed):

$ cabal update

$ cabal install darcs

This should give you a darcs binary in `~/.cabal/bin` -- you should probably add this to your PATH. More detailed instructions for installing on Windows are available near the end of this announcement.


Installing on Windows


To install darcs on Windows systems from scratch, please download the Haskell Platform and MSYS:

After installing both, you should have an "MSYS" icon: run MSYS and in the terminal window type (the `$` character denotes the prompt, do not repeat it):

$ cabal update

$ cabal install darcs -f-curl

This should download, compile and install all required dependencies and also darcs 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).

Followers