[darcs-devel] [issue642] Automatic detection of file renames

[Alexander Staubo]

On Feb 5, 2008 4:22 PM, David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 07:30:33PM +0100, Alexander Staubo wrote:
> > I would love to see someone use kernel facilities such as FSEvents [1] on
> > OS X and inotify [2] on Linux to accomplish this. (There are also others
> > such as fam [3], and Windows has its own easy-to-use API.)
>
> One nice thing about this feature is that as far as I can tell, there's
> essentially no benefit to implementing it in darcs.  You could implement it
> in any language for any platform, and all you need to do is call darcs mv
> whenever you detect a file rename in a darcs repository.

True, but tighter integration with Darcs would mean a smoother user
experience. I would rather have such a monitoring system be
subservient of Darcs rather than an active player, which makes the
separation of concerns cleaner: the monitor exists to gather
information, and Darcs uses that information; and I would prefer to
know about the existence of the monitor as long as Darcs is able to
control it. But you're right, it could be implemented either way.

Alexander.