[darcs-users] Fwd: Darcs Problems

John Lato jwlato at gmail.com
Fri Mar 1 08:31:38 UTC 2013


On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Ganesh Sittampalam <ganesh at earth.li> wrote:

> On 01/03/2013 03:48, John Lato wrote:
> >
> > Agreed.  This is a big part of my point, although in much clearer
> > verbiage.  A clear history is very useful for determining the context of
> > current work.  Git users value this history quite highly, as evidenced
> > by the vast amount of time git users spend rebasing to clean up history,
> > developing best practices for maintaining a clean history, etc.
> >  Patch-oriented VCS's don't really have anything comparable.
> >
> > I was thinking about a possible implementation a few days ago, and came
> > up with this idea.  Darcs could add another special patch, which I'm
> > calling a base patch.  A base patch would have the following properties:
> >
> > 1.  Every patch applied after a base patch depends on the base patch.
> > 2.  A base patch doesn't depend on anything, but it conflicts anywhere
> > its dependents would conflict.
>
> I think this will be difficult, because the set of dependents isn't a
> fixed thing; if a new dependent patch comes along, it changes the
> behaviour of the base patch, which could be arbitrarily far way in the
> linear history.
>

Right.  Every time you add/remove a patch, first its dependents need to be
calculated independently of the base patch.  Then the base patch's
dependents are updated too.  Since the dependencies of a base patch are
dynamic by definition, just changing those dependencies doesn't change the
identity of the base patch.


>
> > This would make a base patch act as essentially a starting point for a
> > group of patches that logically work together (they're all based on the
> > base patch).  I think you'd also need either a tag or another special
> > patch to act as the other end of a base patch.
> >
> > I think an equivalent statement is that a base patch doesn't commute
> > with any of its dependents, but it does commute with any antecedent
> > patches its dependents commute with.
> >
> > What the base patch gives you is the ability to pick commits without
> > their dependencies.  Suppose you have two branches, stable and dev, and
> > you want to pick a patch 'hotfix' from dev to stable.  hotfix will most
> > likely have several other dependencies in dev, but you don't want those.
> >  You want to just take hotfix and fix any conflicts.  So you would do
> > the following:
> > make a new repo 'tmp-dev', which has everything in 'dev' except 'hotfix'
> > apply a base patch
> > pull hotfix
> > from the stable repo, cherrypick tmp-dev's hotfix (which will also bring
> > the base patch)
> >
> > When trying to apply the base patch to the stable repo, the base patch
> > will conflict everywhere hotfix's dependencies are unmet.  To resolve
> > the conflicts, we first undo hotfix, then apply hotfix' (the new patch).
> >  We don't actually touch the base patch when resolving conflicts, but
> > after the resolution, the base patch's dependents have changed, so now
> > it will only conflict where hotfix' would (since the original hotfix is
> > undone).  At this point, the developer would apply a tag (or end-base)
> > patch and it's done.
>
> Could you explain this workflow a bit more - how does the base patch
> help with dependencies? To pull the hotfix you are also pulling the
> unwanted dependencies, and its those that you need to deal with.
>

I guess what would happen is that, when you pull the hotfix into the
tmp-dev repo, what happens is that you create a new patch, tmp-hotfix,
which has none of the dependencies of the original patch, and only depends
on the base patch.

As with rebase, this gives you a new patch with a separate identity.  But
maybe that's acceptable; git users have gotten used to it.

Or maybe it would be possible to make base patches transparent to patch
identities, e.g.

patch foo depends on bar,baz
patch foo' depends on some-base that has the dependency foo'->bar,baz

If the base patch records dependencies for each dependent patch, then when
getting the dependencies of foo', we first look to base, see it's a base
patch, then look up bar,baz and return just bar,baz.  In that sense, foo'
could then have the same identity as foo.


> As far as tracking history goes in general, my feeling is that
> conceptually tags are good enough to represent this, and the main thing
> we need is good enough UI to make them usable for this purpose.
>
> The basic idea is that each time you record a patch, you also create a
> tag - let's call it a "history" tag. The history tag will depend on the
> newly-recorded patch, and also the most recent previous tag, which will
> typically be the history tag for the previous patch. Patches never
> depend on tags unless you make them do so explicitly, so the patch
> itself won't depend on any history tags by default.
>
> What you end up with then is a chain of history tags, each depending on
> the previous one and a single patch, that communicate a particular
> ordering for the related patches, but don't actually enforce it, because
> you can always pull without the tags.
>

I agree that tags are good enough to represent history, and this seems like
a sensible approach.

Even without historical tags, I think that darcs in its current state is
perfectly capable of showing quite a lot of historical/contextual
information about a repository, it's just missing some of the tools to do
so.  I've tried to hack on darcs a bit before, but honestly I find the
codebase a bit difficult to comprehend.  It's well-organized and generally
well-documented, but very idiosyncratic.


>
> If you want to see the context in which a particular patch was
> originally written, it's represented by the history tag for that patch.
> If you want to cherry pick it, just ignore the tags and get the patch
> (if there aren't any problems with dependencies).
>
> This approach is also something I see as the ideal way to track the
> history of specific branches - e.g. production. In that case you would
> tag each time you pull patches from development, so keeping a separate
> record of "what was in production". I've also been pushing this idea on
> Owen for the git bridge to encode the ordering of the git commits on the
> darcs side.
>
> This kind of approach is probably closer to the mercurial philosophy of
> tracking the original context a change was made in, rather than
> aggressively cleaning up with rebase. However the ability to use a
> different sequence of tags to represent a different branch also lets you
> encode later merges etc.
>
> As you mentioned upthread, having a lot of tags cluttering the changelog
> would be distracting, so we would need some way to hide history tags by
> default.
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