[darcs-users] Fwd: Towards a conflict-free revision control system.

[Grant Husbands]

Kari Hoijarvi wrote:
> Darcs has made me dislike more and more text files as source storage
> method. So many conflicts I have in TortoiseDarcs 2 are just formatting
> issues, nothing else, and I'm just a solo developer with repositories in
> two machines. Getting rid of text would improve situation more than
> attempting to merge text right. For example whitespace formatting
> patches would simply go away.

I do believe the Darcs model could still work for you, in this case,
were someone to add whitespace-change patches (and good detection for
them). Essentially, I'm thinking of two patch types:
1. Indent/Outdent some range of lines (adding/removing a given
sequence of whitespace characters)
2. New whitespace for some range of lines

The first patch type has the advantage of commuting well with pretty
much all patch types (including itself). It's also the most common
case in which I find myself working around Darcs. The last should
hopefully be able to represent a whitespace change of arbitrary kind,
at the start and end of the lines. It would hopefully, for the most
part, not conflict with normal text patches for the same lines.

I'm hoping that people will agree and that someone will want to
implement it (especially the first one). I originally planned to first
try this patch type in a new version control system, but it seems
unlikely that I'll ever write it. Similar patch types would be an
improvement for any change-based version control system, I think,
including Darcs and the conflict-free RCS.

Regards,
Grant.