[darcs-users] Appends to files must depend on previous appends?

Pekka Pessi ppessi at gmail.com
Tue May 13 22:20:14 UTC 2008


2008/5/13 Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>:
> So an unhappy comment showed up on Reddit recently: <http://reddit.com/info/6j1ao/comments/c03zfnz>.
>
>  The author's plaint is that appends to a file are treated as dependent on the previous appends, so in a file 'a\nb\nc\nd', anything that removes 'b' wipes out c and d. (Which I find a reasonable concern, since I manage a personal file, .ztypos, which is appended to over time, and I'm bothered that I can't go back and selectively erase anything but the last one).

>  Intuitively, I don't see any intrinsic difference between the cases -

In latter case, foo and bar insert text at the same place.

>shouldn't darcs be smart enough to hold onto bar in the latter case?

Darcs is even smarter. If it allowed you to unpull foo, what would
happen when you tried to pull foo back from another repo? There would
be no way to know which one should go first, foo or bar.  You would
end up with two repositories with exactly the same patches, but one
would have a conflict, another would not.

-- 
Pekka.Pessi mail at nokia.com


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