[darcs-users] Darcs 2.5 roadmap

[Sittampalam, Ganesh]

Simon Marlow wrote:

> I like the above two.  Also, if I'm allowed to vote for things that
> would be important for us: 

Please do! I think GHC is by far our most important customer, both
because it's the largest project using darcs and because you guys make
something that's rather important to us so we'd like you to be
productive ;-)

> 1. Better information about conflicts. Currently, you don't even get
> to find out which two patches are in conflict, which seems a bit
> silly (you know which files have conflicts, and you can see one, but
> not the other patch(es)).   
> 
> Conflict markers are almost useless, as the hunks are in a random
> order and not marked with the patch that they come from. 
>
> I'm aware that these may be difficult to fix - I think that was the
> conclusion last time I brought it up - but nevertheless we shouldn't
> forget that this is a serious problem with the darcs UI at the
> moment, and so despite its difficulty should IMHO be given a high
> priority (personally I care a lot more about this than hunk
> splitting, for example).     

Another problem with conflict marking is that sometimes a simple 2-way
conflict can leave you with 3 or more conflicting options. By "2-way" I
mean merging two different linear branches without conflicts. It's just
silly that this happens.

I've got some local work that mostly fixes this that I hope to submit
soon, but it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to do a perfect job
given our current conflict representation. However, that work does give
me some ideas as to how we might improve on the points you mention above
without a patch format change. I'll give it some more thought.

> 2. Rebase.

I promise I haven't forgotten about this :-) I mentioned to you in
December (in person) that I had the basic infrastructure working, and
I've gradually been improving on that, mostly by using it myself and
finding bad bits of behaviour. The improved conflict marking above is
one example of a problem I found myself needing to fix to make rebase
usable, as it seems more prone to generating such nasty conflict marks.

There's still a fair bit to do, and judging by the hunk editing
discussion, getting the UI design right will also take quite a while.
But I am targeting 2.5 for it, and hopefully the sprint in late March
will give us (the Darcs team) an opportunity to take a good look at the
UI design in person as well as to review the overall design of the
feature.

Ganesh

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