[darcs-users] locking

[Albert Reiner]

[Ketil Malde <ketil.malde at bccs.uib.no>, Thu, 23 Feb 2006 06:46:27 +0100]:
> For LaTeX etc, line breaks are fairly arbitrary - ie. paragraphs get
> rebroken all the time. Wouldn't it make sense to use the same old
> diff, but over words (whitespace-separated tokens) instead of lines?

A few comments:

- Tokens are not always delimited by whitespace; e.g., in noweb you
  might write <<foo bar>>_baz, of which "<<foo bar>>" should probably
  be counted as a token for some operations, and "<<foo bar>>_baz" for
  others.

- In quite a few instances (such as, e.g., the typical mmm-mode emacs
  files, or literate programming source files) the notion of a token
  must be different in different parts of the file.

- Whitespace (or indentation) is obviously significant in some
  languages like, e.g., Haskell.  How would token diffing distinguish
  between things that differ only in indentation?

- as with the (imho) simpler idea of allowing formatting filters to
  convert _darcs/current/ to a standardized format while letting the
  user work in his/her preferred style in the working tree, it might
  be difficult to give line numbers meaningful in the context of the
  working tree.  (I would not mind that, but people have said this is
  important.)

Regards,

Albert.