[darcs-users] Make darcs force-commute patches from CLI, to learn about darcs?

[James Cook]

> There is also more than just hunks. What about file renames? A file
> rename commutes with a hunk that changes the file, and in darcs this
> changes the hunk patch to refer to the renamed file. You need to change
> the internal representation to refer to files using UUIDs to get around
> that. And as soon as you do that you get the same problems with global
> uniqueness invariants that you previously had for patches. There is a
> reason why git cannot track file renames: they store just trees and
> identify them by their content hash. This is secure and quite efficient,
> but properly tracking file renames is not possible in such a model.
> AFAIK Pijul suffers from a similar limitation and for the same reason
> i.e. there is no primitive "rename" patch, only file-remove and file-add.

I think Pijul does handle renames intelligently. (I just tested:
merging a rename "f -> g" with an edit to f results in editing g.)

A while ago I poked at Pijul's patch representation and inferred that
it indeed gives each file a unique ID, and that ID is based on the ID
of the patch that created it. I think it does something similar to
assign identities to individual lines in files. I imagine it does the
same thing for directories. Don't quote me on this, though.

James