[darcs-users] *practical* differences between darcs' patch model and git/mercurial's?

[Matthew Palmer]

On Sun, Oct 21, 2007 at 09:32:48AM -0700, Adam Megacz wrote:
> 
> Matt Palmer <mpalmer at hezmatt.org> writes:
> > Cherry picking.  Darcs' cherry picking abilities are fantastic, while every
> > other system (and I've tried most of 'em by now) seems to have at least one
> > big inhibitor to cherry picking.  For the way I work on the systems I work
> > on, good cherry picking is a must.
> 
> My experience with cherry-picking in darcs is that it works nicely,
> but usually drags in a huge quantity of patches that it feels the
> cherry-picked patch "depends" on (the "depends" appears to be
> calculated very, very conservatively).

The only place where I've *ever* seen Darcs pull in dependent patches that I
wouldn't immediately say "oh yeah, that's needed" is when a patch that
creates a file depends on the patch(es) that make the directory tree that the
file is created in.

> Aside from not needing to generate merger-patches, is this any
> different from mercurial/git?  In those systems, if you're willing to
> drag in the entire history leading up to the chosen patch and generate
> a merger, is there ever a problem with cherry-picking?

That's not cherry picking, though, that's just regular merging.

> > I've seen instructions in projects' development guides to avoid merging when
> > it's not absolutely necessary to avoid polluting the change history with
> > merges.  A revision control system that makes its users avoid merges seems a
> > bit suboptimal to me.
> 
> Yes, I agree.  My only gripe is that cherry picking seems to trigger
> darcs' bad time-complexity behaviors, so it has become "good darcs
> practice" to not use the one feature that distinguishes it from other
> systems.

That's strange, I cherry pick constantly and have yet to hit the
time-complexity problems.

> Or maybe I'm just cranky from having lost nearly every "what revision
> control should we use?" debate lately.

I've just stopped arguing.  Saves ulcers.

- Matt

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