[darcs-users] Patches are immutable

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn zooko at zooko.com
Tue Oct 26 10:49:47 UTC 2004


Juliusz:

Thanks for the good rant.


On 2004, Oct 24, at 13:03, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:

>   (Side note: arguably, with 20/20 hindsight, better notions of patch
>    identity could be devised -- one could think of using a random
>    identity, or a hash of the patch contents, as in Monotone.  But that
>    is not the way Darcs works.)

It occurs to me that if I use darcs programmatically from another tool, 
for example the tailor.py script that I currently use, then I'm playing 
Russian Roulette with darcs's unsafe method of generating unique patch 
ids.

Is it too late to change patch ids to be 128-bit random numbers?


Anyway, "rerecord" could be implemented by generating the inverse of 
the old patch and then generating a new patch with a new id.  That 
would provide the convenient user interface without the danger of two 
patches with the same name.

--Z






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