[darcs-users] Re: Sluggishness of pulls and deleted files

[Tommy Pettersson]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 07:59:39AM +0000, Tuomo Valkonen wrote:
> As far as I know, moves have no such merger problems as the current
> delete.

That's correct. The operations "replace line 10 in file"and
"rename file" can be done in any order so they commute, but the
operations "replace line 10 in file" and "remove file" must be
done in that particular order so they don't commute and that's
the seed for growing mergers.

Some darcs people do advocate moving old files to an Attic
directory instead of removing them. If darcs did this
internally, without actually rendering the specially renamed
files in working at all (as I think you propose), it wouldn't be
any visible change to the user. There could however be "real"
conflicts in "deleted" files, (and they could still grow
exponentially, although I think much less likely), and there
would now be an interesting UI problem for how to deal with
them.

I'm cc-ing darcs-devel for comments.


-- 
Tommy Pettersson <ptp at lysator.liu.se>