[darcs-users] Colin Walters blogs on Arch changesets vs Darcs

Florian Weimer fw at deneb.enyo.de
Fri Nov 19 17:04:15 UTC 2004


* Mark Stosberg:

> You may be interested in this thoughtful blog entry by Colin Walters,
> explaining how Arch changesets work compared to darcs, and his thoughts
> on matter:
>
> http://verbum.org/blog/freesoftware/orthogonal-changesets
>
> He prefers the Arch system, and gives a valid 'use case' where he
> thinks it would be preferable. 

His argument has certainly some merit.  But as it happens, the arch
folks almost *never* send around isolated changesets.  It tends to
break star-merge, IIRC.

Unfortunately, the arch approach which chooses patch targets based
upon file identity is not very useful because the file might have been
split into two.  In such cases, you probably want to try to apply the
patch to *both* files.  GNU arch cannot handle that.  If both forks
use different identity tags, it won't work, either.

Maybe we would see more use of "tla mkpatch" if actually created
human-readable text output for text files.  Currently, it writes a
directory structure, which you cannot directly include in an email
message.  This makes arch changesets rather useless for peer review on
mailing lists.




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