[darcs-devel] conflicted rebase (or rather: rebase with conflicted fixups)

[Ben Franksen]

Hi Ganesh

I changed my mind about the three rebase variants. After thinking very
hard about this for quite some time, I came to the conclusion that
variant B is the best we can do. It has flaws, but it works as expected
in most cases and with the problematic ones at least it doesn't crash.

With any variant that includes conflicted patches in the rebase state,
amending a patch really amounts to patch editing in the middle of a
repo. This means that some of the things we want to do with amend simply
cannot be allowed in order to not destroy the invariants on which
conflictors rely. The restrictions we'd have to impose on what amend is
allowed to do in order to preserve all these invariants would make
amend-with-rebase a lot less useful than it currently is.


In practical terms, this means you can regard all the rebase changes for
variant B as accepted. I am not going to review them all in detail
simply because I am very near to burning out on this whole rebase thing.
I hope you will continue to add more test cases that clarify what works
and what does not and, if possible, add a bit more user-level
documentation for rebase.

But mainly, let's move on toward getting 2.16 out. We made made so many
really great improvements to darcs in the last two or three years and I
am the only one who profits because I am the only one who actually uses
the head in anger. This is stupid. We should release more often.

Cheers
Ben