[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Re: darcs vs tla

[Anand Kumria]

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 10:36:36 +0000, Catalin Marinas wrote:

> On Mon, 2004-11-08 at 23:27, Thomas Lord wrote:
>> So: does Darcs' merge operators (the deep distinction it has from arch)
>> really "add value"?  at scale?   What's up with those?   Does anyone
>> actually /know/?
> 
> What the darcs operators can do is happily merge a patch which adds some
> lines at the end of an existing patch (which is not merged). Arch would
> fail this because the diff context contains the patch which is not merged.
> This might not be good for C language files but might be OK for makefiles.

Ah, yes - something that bugged me today after a star-merge; all my
conflicts were at the end of files. I'm guessing that that is a problem
with diff/patch? Does darcs contain it's own version of these, or call
out? Perhaps it uses different options which arch should pick up?

> Another interesting thing the operators remove is the need for file ids.
> If the P1 patch modifies a file's name and P2 adds some text to this file,
> P2 can be properly merged into a tree which does not contain P1 because
> the commutation operators would change the P2 patch so that it applies the
> changes to the original file name.

Without ids of some sort, how can darcs determine that P2 is modifying the
same file that P1 renamed? Are you saying that on commit P2 would be
stored as a modification on the original file (P1 filename) but at a later
point in time?

Cheers,
Anand