[darcs-devel] Re: [darcs-conflicts] bit more of a summary of new conflict-handling ideas

Ganesh Sittampalam ganesh at earth.li
Wed Jul 12 12:53:57 PDT 2006


Some random comments about the bits I can digest easily:

On Wed, 12 Jul 2006, David Roundy wrote:

> 2. We're going to have to be doing considerably more rearranging and
> modifying of patches than in current darcs, in which a patch file is
> untouched after it's created in a repository.

Is this true of optimize --reorder? If not, are gets already unsafe in 
that particular case?

> 5. (The crazy idea) The new scheme is going to have to treat primitive
> patches as the "first-class" objects, rather than named composite
> patches as is currently the case.

This is a good thing anyway. Conflicts/dependencies with small parts of 
composite patches causing the whole lot to cause problems (e.g. inability 
to unpull a dependend-on patch) is a real nuisance sometimes.

> I've now got a new related idea, which has a very strong appeal. How 
> about we make the "name" (patch id, or PatchInfo) of a patch no longer 
> be part of its identity, but instead be a sort of tag that's attached to 
> it?  So that a given primitive patch could now have more than one name.

This sounds good.

> This would give us "for free" the feature that patches that are 
> identical except in name do not conflict.

I've said this before, but please don't allow this to happen without human 
confirmation that it should. I know that in 99% of cases it's what's 
wanted, but in the other 1% or 0.1% it's not, and it's much harder to sort 
out the mess when it's happened unwantedly than vice versa.

Cheers,

Ganesh




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