[darcs-users] Re: Onto which other patches does a patch depend?

[David Roundy]

On Mon, Jan 03, 2005 at 09:24:33PM +0000, Mark Stosberg wrote:
> On 2005-01-03, Erik Schnetter <schnetter at aei.mpg.de> wrote:
> >
> > I assume that I recorded some other patch later on that depends on this 
> > patch.  What does "depend" mean?  
> 
> I think it means "requires the existence of to make sense".

The commutation definition is also correct.  One patch depends on another
if the two of them don't commute.

> > How do I find out onto which other patches this patch depends? 
> 
> I believe discovering this a feature currently missing from darcs.

Indeed.  There are nicer tricks to see dependencies than have been
suggested so far.

The easiest is if you can use the gui.  In that case, a simple pull into a
test repo lacking all the relevant patch, followed by a few clickings makes
it pretty easy to see who depends on whom.  When you tell darcs to pull a
patch, it automatically also selects all the patches that patch depends on.
When you deselect a selected patch, darcs deselects all the patches that
depend on the one you've deselected.

You can do the same thing with the text interface, but it's a lot more of a
pain, since you need to use 'j' and 'k' to see which patches have been
selected and deselected.  The problem is that the text interface just
doesn't have as much bandwidth as the gui interface.

If someone can come up with a nice interface for this, we could add a
command to query patch dependencies.  Mentioning the dependency when saying
"Skipping depended-upon patch" would be good, but wouldn't be trivial, as
it would require a bit of clever work on the internals of the patch
selection code.
-- 
David Roundy
http://civet.berkeley.edu/droundy/