[darcs-users] Status of issue #291 (hunk editing)

[Rob Hoelz]

Alright, I've been working on this on and off for a while now, so I
figure I should put down a bit of an update:

There's a sort-of working implementation in my repository at
http://darcs.hoelzro.net/darcs.  This implementation will allow you to
edit a file at a given hunk, and it'll build a new hunk list for that
file when you're done.  However, the new hunks won't make it into the
recorded patch, and any old hunks that you may have removed during your
edit are still there (More on this below).  There are more notes about
the limitations of my implementation in the patch's comment section,
but they aren't as bad/difficult to solve as the problem I'm about to
discuss.

The reason my implementation hasn't made any progress in the last month
is that I've been trying to figure out how to create a new PatchChoices
object to reflect the new set of hunks.  The problem with this is that
if I were to make a new PatchChoices object, I would lose all of the
user's previous selections, which makes hunk editing pretty much
useless.  So for this feature to progress, one of the following needs
to happen:

- I need to be proven wrong in my conception that there's no way to
  import the choices from one PatchChoices object to another.  I base
  this on the idea that a Tag from one PatchChoices object only
  identifies its associated hunk in that PatchChoices object, and not
  in any other PatchChoices object.

- The PatchChoices facility needs to be retooled so that each hunk has a
  unique ID across all PatchChoices objects.  I feel this could be
  implemented with something like a map, with a hunk's checksum as the
  key.

Normally, I'd proceed along option #2, but I'd rather have my thoughts
reviewed by more experienced Darcs hackers before I make large code
changes.

Thanks,
Rob
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