[darcs-devel] Re: [darcs-conflicts] identical patches (was: bit more of a summaryof new conflict-handling ideas)

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, David Roundy wrote:

> The one person who has darcs warn him about changes which are members
> of more than one patch will notice and push a fix (in the relatively
> rare case that it is necesary) to everyone else, just like any other
> bug in the code.

Ah, yes, ok.

The only problem I can see is where it's often ok to have identical 
patches be merged, but there are a few cases where they shouldn't be. How 
does the user hide the warnings about the ok cases so that the problematic 
cases get noticed?

>> Your new approach to resolutions probably makes it very easy to add a
>> resolution type that means "accept both these identical patches", which
>> would solve this problem, though I haven't worked this out for sure.
>
> That's precisely the problem I'm talking about.  If two people use
> this resolution that indicates "accept both these identical patches",
> then there's a conflict between their two identical resolutions saying
> to resolve those previous identical patches.

True. I think most people these days use darcs in a relatively 
hierarchical model, but this kind of escalating conflict problem may be 
one of the barriers to greater adoption of distributed working.

>> Another possibility would be to make it a property of the primitive patch
>> whether it could be silently merged with an identical primitive patch.
>> This is probably less elegant and more burdensome on the UI, though.
>> (Probably the default behaviour should be controlled a pullable repo
>> property like setpref boringfile).
>
> Definitely not.  Way too cumbersome, for no benefit that I can
> discern.

Well, there is a benefit, it means that people like me can configure their 
repositories so that identical patches always conflict and not have to 
watch out for a special warning. I'd have thought that if you are tagging 
patches with other stuff anyway this wouldn't be particularly cumbersome. 
But I think a warning with decent UI would be good enough.

Cheers,

Ganesh