[darcs-users] Patches are immutable

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 06:03:57PM +0200, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> 1. Background: referential transparency
> 
> Any person discovering Darcs is amazed at its simplicity -- all the
> features of Arch with the simplicity of RCS.  Some people might think
> this is simply due to a well-designed user-interface; they don't
> understand that a simple user-interface is only possible with a
> well-designed data structure.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I've learned the value of simplicity
the hard way, by making or maintaining too complex programs.

However...

> There is a lot of confusion about the rerecord command in Darcs,
> leading various people to propose renaming it or adding random
> metadata to repositories to make it slightly more safe.  I believe
> those people are losing their time: rerecord breaks the basic
> assumptions in Darcs, which is what makes it fundamentally confusing.
> The only solution is not to use rerecord.

I think that rerecord doesn't break immutability of patches. AFAICS, it
records the patch again, with a different time, so a different identity.
It seems to be a shorthand for unrecord+record. rerecord no more dangerous
than unrecord followed by record. Well, maybe a little more dangerous,
because it is so easy to overuse.

Pozdrawiam,
Tomek

-- 
.signature: Too many levels of symbolic links