[darcs-users] Repository as a branch

[Maurí­cio]

Hi,

How fundamental to darcs phylosophy is the decision of
considering a repo a branch?

The reason I ask is that I would like to tell people who work
with me about darcs, but there's a major problem I can't solve.

That is: suppose I have tree people working on a single
project. Each one is working on a different line of
development. So, every person will probably have three
repositories: one at work, one at home and one at a remote server
with backup system that also allows syncronization between all
repositories. Since people sometimes have a few different ideas
at the same time, it would not be unusual to have 5 or 6 repos
per individual.

There's a aditional problem: since home and office are usually
under NAT, we can ssh to remote server, but we can't ssh from
remote server to home or office. This means every time we have
a conflict (say, between some code I wrote at home and other
I wrote at office) we need to create a bundle of patches in
order to apply them to the remote server.

So, for a 3 people environment, we have around 12 repositories,
with regular small annoyances when pushing conflicting patches.

Is there something wrong with my comments? Do you think there's
a better way to understand that issue that I wasn't able to see?

My understanding is that this could be easy to solve if we could
have a branch tree. In the above situation, we would only need
1 repository at the main server. And since darcs is smart it
could even tell us when to branch, by considering branching
the default way to go when we have conflicts, but keeping all
consistent patches as a common tree. (Solving conflicts would
be delayed to branch merging, which we would do at our own time.)

Sorry for this long mail, but this is the single issue I have
about using darcs as our source control tool for all our work.

Thanks for your attention,
Maurício