[darcs-users] break line, combine lines, add/delete whitespace as patch primitives?

Adam Megacz adam at megacz.com
Wed May 5 06:23:19 UTC 2004


So, obviously the ideal is to use the tree-transform stuff from that
Pierce paper.  In the meantime...

We discovered earlier that running emacs' M-q (reflow paragraph) on a
big text file wreaks havoc on darcs; it thinks you changed every line
in the file and spends over two days pegging a 1ghz cpu trying to
merge it.

Perhaps, like token-replace, there should be four new patch primitives
for:

  - split line at character 'n'
  - merge line with following line
  - insert 'n' chars of whitespace after 'm'th char in line
  - delete 'n' chars of whitespace starting with 'm'th char on line

This would be nice for other things too; for example darcs could make
a visible indication when asking you about patches if a patch only
involves line break/merge and whitespace changes... if it's (for
example) C/C++/Java source code (but not Haskell!) I would probably
just okay any such change after barely skimming it.

  - a

-- 
"Truth is One, though the Sages know it as Many."    -- Rig Veda




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