[darcs-users] [Haskell-cafe] Re: poll: how can we help you contribute to darcs?

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2008 Aug 3, at 19:16, Ben Franksen wrote:

> The naive way to emulate your split feature would be to create a  
> branch
> where you delete all the stuff you don't want and then maybe move the
> subproject to a new directory (nearer the top-level). This doesn't  
> work,
> however, at least not in practice. This is because deletion of a file
> conflicts with a change to the same file which leads to a huge  
> amount of
> conflicts each time you pull from the old combined repo. And the  
> reason you
> get these conflicts is that in darcs a file always gets emptied before
> deletion, and this is because changing a file depends on its  
> existence in
> the first place. I proposed to change this and allow changes to
> non-existing files, so called 'ghosts'. This has a number of  
> interesting
> consequences, among them that you could delete as many files as you  
> want
> and will never again get a conflict with changes to those files  
> (that is,
> unless you explicitly 'resurrect' the ghost).
>
> Unfortunately few people (and none of the core-developers) seemed to  
> be
> interested :( The small thread that developed on the darcs-users list
> should still be available in the archives if you are interested in the
> details.


I would suggest that they'd be more interested if you provided code;  
if they have no need for your proposal they're unlikely to devote time  
to coding it.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH