[darcs-users] big-patches problem!

[Isaac Dupree]

Gwern Branwen wrote:
> There's no winning, is there. :( One big patch doesn't commute, and a
> lot of little patches pollutes the history, and mixing it into other
> changes is unclear.

"pollutes the history" is an excuse that bothers me.  Why? 
Because the only effect is on user-interface things that we 
could easily change, such as `darcs changes`.  Maybe when 
you make a patch bundle there should be some way to specify 
that all the patches do the same thing and should normally 
be shown as just one entry in the history.  Either we'd need 
to have an explicit way to mark that "same thing" concept 
(which could be somewhat powerful actually, but work), or we 
could go a simpler route: consecutive patches with the exact 
same description-line (or some other convention?) are shown 
as one entry in `darcs changes` et al., marked somehow to 
show that it's not actually a single patch.  (changes 
--xml-output would not be affected, as it's the 
machine-readable version :-)).  Yes, "consecutive" is a bit 
ad-hoc in darcs, but I'd guess it'd work out pretty well?

-Isaac