[darcs-users] darcs cannot apply some patch bundles

[Michael Hendricks]

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 1:09 AM, Eric Kow <eric.kow at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 4 Mar 2012, at 12:28, Ben Franksen wrote:
>> As far as I am concerned, the 'darcs send computes minimal context' solution
>> would be perfect. But I have no idea how difficult that is (both for the
>> darcs developers and then for darcs). For a compromise, maybe some
>> approximation of 'minimal' would be good enough in practice.
>
> Ah yes, I think I remember that one issue is that computing the minimal context is actually expensive.

Since I'm not yet familiar with Darcs' internal workings, can someone
help me understand why calculating a minimal context is so expensive?
Is it because Darcs doesn't have quick access to patch summaries and
must load every patch, in its entirety, from disk to perform a
commutation?

If that's the reason, is it possible to store patch summaries (like
"hunk ./src/Darcs/Repository/Merge.hs 83 -1 +1") in the inventory
files?  To my naive understanding, it seems that many commutations
could be calculated with just those summaries.

Thanks for any insight.

--
Michael