[darcs-users] Naming consistency between darcs and other DVCSs

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Dan Pascu writes:

 > While I understand Stephen's argument about the analogy with rollback  
 > from the database terminology, I'm not bothered by the fact that  
 > darcs' rollback goes deeper than the last transaction.

That's not an issue here.  That happens to be true of Mercurial's
implementation.  The important difference is that a rollback in
database terminology means that the transaction is deleted from
history.  As you point out this would be very dangerous in Darcs
because in Darcs rollback *adds* a patch.

 > While a similarity with something like the database terminology could  
 > be useful to some degree, I do not expect that if we use similar terms  
 > they also behave exactly the same since the database field and the VCS  
 > field are not the same thing.

That's absolutely true.  VCS is a *proper* subset of the database
field, an application of abstract database technology.  It is
primarily the idiosyncratic terminology of VCS that leads people to
believe otherwise.