[darcs-users] Formal documentation

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2011, Michael Olney wrote:

> <ganesh at earth.li> wrote:
>> I think the important pieces are an appropriate set of definitions, a set of
>> properties that all patch system should obey, a proof that the existing
>> implementation of "primitive" patches in darcs obeys those properties, and a
>> proof that anything that obeys those properties does indeed behave
>> consistently when you commute and merge patches in it.
>
> It may be my own ignorance at work, but it's not clear to me how much
> mileage you would get out of this scheme. The basic properties of
> patch theory seem to be extremely general. Consistency with these
> properties alone doesn't appear to tell me much about how the system
> is going to behave when I use it.

The key property is that any given set of patches, you get the same 
repository state no matter what order those patches are currently stored 
in. That underpins the "first-class cherry-picking" and "no fresh 
commit for merges" that darcs has and other VCS systems don't.

Ganesh