[darcs-devel] [issue229] Stick to your knitting, darcs." (I wish that patches that touched adjacent lines did not depend on each other.)

[Zooko]

New submission from Zooko <zooko at zooko.com>:

Every other automatic dependency in darcs's patch theory is strictly a 
syntactic requirement -- for example a patch that inserts a hunk into a 
file syntactically depends on the patch that creates the file.

But the automatic dependency of a hunk patch on the hunk patch that 
touched the *preceding* or *succeeding* line is not a mere syntactic 
requirement -- it is a heuristic in which darcs guesses that such 
patches might be semantically dependent.  This guess could be right or 
wrong depending on what language and what engineering practices are used 
in the file.

My co-worker at Allmydata just started adding dummy lines in between 
each element of a set so that patches that change elements of the set 
will not automatically depend on the most recent patch which changed the 
adjacent element.

I suggest that darcs should stick to its simple rules about syntactic 
dependency and leave the semantics to the user.

Regards,

Zooko

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messages: 837
nosy: droundy, tommy, zooko
status: unread
title: Stick to your knitting, darcs."  (I wish that patches that touched adjacent lines did not depend on each other.)

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