[darcs-users] darcs transplant [was: darcs weekly news #28]

Eric Kow kowey at darcs.net
Thu May 14 16:45:15 UTC 2009


On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 14:16:02 +1000, Trent W. Buck wrote:
> Discussion of transplant is in http://bugs.darcs.net/issue938.
> 
> My impression that it was intended for exceptional cases where a
> retroactive continuity change will avoid an exponential merge or
> conflictingnons thingy, rather than for regular use.  I guess we'll
> find out when someone implements it :-)

There are three types of darcs transplant-y ideas I have heard of:

My personal use case is as part of a darcs first-aid tool: recovering
from corruption introduced, for example, by an older version of darcs;
or maybe dealing with poor decisions of the past.  These would be cases
for which there is no meaningful fully, automated darcs repair command.
The darcs transplant command would be used for automating the recovery
process as much as possible: fix the damage by hand, then transplant
your patches over to the repaired repository.

The more popular use case is as a mechanism to help with long lived
branches as Simon mentioned.  A stronger of this is to have a mechanism
that keeps tracks of equivalences between transplanted patches so that
patches could still conceivably flow back and forth.

Finally, another idea is that of amend-record on steroids, which I think
means being able to amend a patch on which other patches depend and
adjusting them accordingly.

Things to keep in mind: this doesn't necessarily need to be one single
"darcs transplant" command.   You could imagine commands like "amend
group" and "amend ungroup" to break patches apart playing a role.  Also,
working out a good user interface for these kind of transplant-y jobs
(and others) could be a good way to contribute to darcs if you have a
good rough mental model of darcs and you're not in a position to do any
deep hacking.

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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