[darcs-users] Re: Where Arch is going

Kannan Goundan cakoose at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 7 18:18:45 UTC 2005


> > On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 12:33:54PM -0300, zooko <at> zooko.com wrote:

> > > The commands like unrecord and amend-record are inevitable consequences 
> > > of decentralized revision control.  If the commands did not exist, you 
> > > could easily achieve the same effect by creating a second repository with 
> > > all patches except the offending patch.  That achieves unrecord.  Then 
> > > you could apply the contents of the offending patch with "diff | patch", 
> > > alter the contents, and record the newly altered patch.  That achieves 
> > > amend-record.

> On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 10:52:59AM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:

> > True, but that still doesn't explain their utility... I guess I struggle
> > to see why it's easier to do this than to just check in a patch that
> > adjusts things to the way they should be, as one would so in most any
> > other VC system.
 
David Roundy <droundy <at> abridgegame.org> writes:

> As others have said, it's nice to have a clean history.  A dirty history is
> all right when it's just you working on the project, but "never mind"
> patches lead to conflicts with other developers.  I agree that if you fix a
> bug then realize the bugfix is wrong, probably you shouldn't amend-record
> that patch.  But if you add a new feature, but forget to darcs add the
> relevant file, it makes perfect sense to amend-record the patch.
> 
> I think of darcs more as a means of communication than a means of storing
> history, and clean patches make it much easier to read and review changes.

For the situation where you forget to add a file, amend-record seems like the
best way to fix it.  However, I think many people use the "record, record,
record, unrecord, amend-record" cycle to collect many small changes.  This seems
less than ideal.

What about having a patch that "encloses" a set of existing patches.  The
enclosing patch will have references to the enclosed patch as well a copy of all
the changes.  By default, doing "darcs pull" will not pull any enclosed patches,
just the enclosing ones (which is why they need a copy of the changes).  Could
this work?

- Kannan





More information about the darcs-users mailing list