[darcs-users] big-patches problem!

[Gwern Branwen]

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On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 6:45 PM, Isaac Dupree  wrote:
> Gwern Branwen wrote:
>>
>> There's no winning, is there. :( One big patch doesn't commute, and a
>> lot of little patches pollutes the history, and mixing it into other
>> changes is unclear.
>
> "pollutes the history" is an excuse that bothers me.  Why? Because the only
> effect is on user-interface things that we could easily change, such as
> `darcs changes`.  Maybe when you make a patch bundle there should be some
> way to specify that all the patches do the same thing and should normally be
> shown as just one entry in the history.  Either we'd need to have an
> explicit way to mark that "same thing" concept (which could be somewhat
> powerful actually, but work), or we could go a simpler route: consecutive
> patches with the exact same description-line (or some other convention?) are
> shown as one entry in `darcs changes` et al., marked somehow to show that
> it's not actually a single patch.  (changes --xml-output would not be
> affected, as it's the machine-readable version :-)).  Yes, "consecutive" is
> a bit ad-hoc in darcs, but I'd guess it'd work out pretty well?
>
> -Isaac

Well, I wonder. Suppose I had done the patches as a 'darcs replace'
(is removing trailing whitespace doable that way?). Then each patch
would appear as basically 2 lines in darcs changes - the summary and
the useless replace depiction. Would that still count as polluting the
history?

- --
gwern
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