[darcs-devel] [Revctrl] DARCS correctness question

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

William Uther writes:

 > > Why would you expect that?  Merger markup expresses a superposition
 > > (hello, physicists!) of two texts; there's always a choice of order
 > > when serializing.
 > 
 > Well, in OT theory a large effort is made to make sure that the same
 > serialization is made in all cases.  It is a bug if different orders
 > appear.

That's one way of proving that the result is correct (you'll get an
empty diff).  But there are other ways of doing it, and if you choose
a particular serialization, you have to show that which serialization
is chosen doesn't matter.

 > Ahh.  I think that might have cleared up my confusion.  Would it be
 > correct to say that DARCS is versioning partially ordered text, and it
 > is just choosing which total order to display to the user differently?

I don't have a good feeling for that.  It's a reasonable analogy, I
suppose.