[darcs-users] Theory of Patches

[Eric Kow]

On Thu, Apr 09, 2009 at 15:42:39 -0700, Jason Dagit wrote:
> My recent M.S. thesis covered darcs witness types.  It focuses on our
> witness types, but chapter 3 provides an alternative overview of patch
> theory, sorry no proofs though.  You can find a copy of my thesis
> here:
> http://files.codersbase.com/thesis.pdf
> and some slides:
> http://files.codersbase.com/thesistalk.pdf
> 
> You might also find it interesting to read about camp, which also uses patches:
> http://projects.haskell.org/camp/
> and
> darcs get http://code.haskell.org/camp/devel/paper/

Starting with Jason's paper and moving on to camp sounds like a good
idea.

You may also want to check out
  http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/PatchTheory
which aims to provide a single stop for all the patch theory information
you may need.

Clearly, it's not there yet (for example, we mention camp, but should
probably be linking the paper directly) and a lot of the resources,
notably
    * WhyYouWantPatchTheory
    * PatchTheoryExample
    * PatchTheoryQuestions
    * PatchTheoryGlossary 
are horribly out of date

In particular, I suggest adding yourself to
  http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/PatchTheoryPeople
at some point to help grow the patch theory community

This is actually a wider problem in the community that I hope we can
overcome someday.  How can we provide folks with a better answer to this
question "where can I learn more about patch theory?"  What can we do to
unify the resources we have? 

At least, I would be pleased if somebody could volunteer to look after
the patch theory section of the wiki...  gently gardening it by pruning
out of date information, answering questions, unifying terminology and
notation...

If you learn anything from this, would you be willing to help at least a
little?  Perhaps just asking questions on this list would be a good
start.

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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