[darcs-users] big-patches problem!

[Christian Kellermann]

Hi,

since I could not resist, please find my comments below.

* Trent W. Buck <trentbuck at gmail.com> [081224 02:10]:
> Isaac Dupree <isaacdupree at charter.net> writes:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> When discussing the power of amend with git users, they pointed out that
> I am essentially throwing away history when I amend.  As long as I'm
> happy to admit my mistakes, a better way[0] would be to just keep
> committing new patches, but somehow declare "this patch amends <hash>".
> 

I think darcs-amend eases a different itch. One nice thing about
darcs is, that it allows you to group semantic things. Changes that
are serving one intended purpose is what I call semantic in this
context. For this amend-record has a lot of use because it helps
you to stay in that group when you are still doing the same thing.

Git users usually cannot do so, because they only have a history
based view of their changes. If you are going along that line I
would agree that you are losing history.

The way I usually deal with this is via spontaneous branches where
I do have all the history I want and then I will 'group' my changes
via darcs amend-record in a staging repo where I also do a darcs
send to the lists from.

With this I get both advantages while providing others a semantically
coherent view of my change.

So rather than discuss technical details I want to raise the question
which development model do you support? How should we change the
UI to support your model of development?

Kind regards,

Christian

-- 
You may use my gpg key for replies:
pub  1024D/47F79788 2005/02/02 Christian Kellermann (C-Keen)
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