[darcs-devel] Re: [darcs-conflicts] new approach to conflicts

[David Roundy]

On Sun, Jul 09, 2006 at 07:34:34AM -0400, David Roundy wrote:
> I've toyed with the idea (disgusting to everyone else) of eliminating
> composite patches entirely at the core level.  We'd still name our
> patches as usual, but the result would be to add a name and primitive
> patch number to each of the primitive patches.  This has a degree of
> elegance that I love, since we'd have one less patch type.  It also
> would open up the possibility of pulling just part of a named patch
> or obliterating just part of a named patch.  This might be a UI
> nightmare, and might make Juliusz' signed patches goal even more
> scarier than it already is.  On the other hand, it might make that
> goal loftier, since signing one named patch versus two together would
> be almost equivalent, which I think would be nice, since you might
> have an intermediate patch you don't want to sign because it opens a
> security hole closed later, so you want to sign the two together
> only.  This idea also has potentially serious efficiency effects, as
> it'll probably increase by an order of magnitude the number of
> "patches" in a repository, so we'll need to be more aggressive about
> breaking the inventory up or grouping primitive patches together, or
> something.

Another advantage of this approach is that it would allow you to check
out just parts of a repository, since you could grab only those
(primitive) patches that affect those parts, and you'd still be able
to interoperate with a full repository.  So we'd "for free" get
something like a subrepository option...
-- 
David Roundy