[darcs-users] seamless git integration (Was: How to develop on a (GHC) branch with darcs)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eric Kow writes:

 >    Darcs needs to be able to work with standard Git repositories

+1

Indeed.  A standard hunk darcs-patch can be expressed efficiently
(enough, in smallish repos) as a pair of git-tree objects.  A
token-replace patch would require additional information (a git-note),
but that could be automatically propagated with cherry-picks.  The
fact of a cherry-pick could be represented as a git-note, actually
two, one for the source commit and one for the target commit.  If this
were done automatically, the transitive closure would compute an
equivalence relation.  That by itself opens up a lot of
possibilities.

However, for doing darcsy stuff, you'd really want the patches
themselves.  Interestingly enough, in a packed format repo, *most*
versions are represented as patches IIUC.

I think you will find that for efficiency Darcs will need to evolve
the "standard git format", but it would be a big win if the darcs-git
format were upward compatible with the standard git format, and the
addition of needed information could be done lazily.