[darcs-users] patch theory documentation cleanup

[Eric Kow]

On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 11:55:46 +0200, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Damn it, have you even seen it? Yesterday you thought that Drupal was  
> derived from Moodle, which is absurd, but today you are still adamant.  
> How do you think that makes you look? An I'm sorry, but I've seen people  
> who are seriously clueless pick up Drupal instantly. Eric already  
> expressed his reasons for not wanting Drupal, he did so in a polite and  
> respectful way and I accepted them in a friendly and positive way. Why  
> can't you do likewise?

I don't think Trent meant any harm here.  He is rather picky with his
software, which I think is a useful trait to have.  Hey, he chose darcs,
right?

Anyway, let's be picky about documentation instead.  One thing I've
noticed is that we may need to harmonise our diagrams with our notation.
Now this is going to be a silly point, but we're being picky, right?
We talk about parallel patches like this: \/; we say that they diverge
from a common point (warning ASCII art ahead):

a   b
 \ /
  o
 

And need to be merged...

 ab
 /\
a  b
 \ /
  o

Note that we have a notation for anti-parallel patches as well /\.
So this is good, except that in the wikibook (and perhaps in the
camp documentation, we drew our diagrams top down...

  o
 / \
a   b

Oops, now the diagrams disagree with the notation.  :-)
Another point in this vein is that the darcs manual still uses the
old p2 p1 order in its notation, as opposed to the newer p1 p2 used
everywhere else...

I'm always vaguely ashamed about noticing these things (and caring
about things like the metric system, A4 paper, ISO dates, etc), but
hey, I guess the only thing we can do is to harness this sort of
pickiness and put it to good use.

By the way, do you ever spend time on IRC?  #darcs on irc.freenode.net
might be a good place to hang out.  Note also that we're having a darcs
hacking sprint this 17-19 April, so it might be a good chance to sit
down and focus on this stuff a while, especially since other people will
be doing the same.

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