Re: [darcs-devel] Darcs and git: plan of action

From: Ray Lee <ray-lk@madrabbit.org>
Date: Apr 19, 2005, 00:07 UTC
Message-ID: <1113869248.23938.94.camel@orca.madrabbit.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050418210436.23935.qmail@science.horizon.com>

On Mon, 2005-04-18 at 21:04 +0000, linux@horizon.com wrote:

> The other is "replace very instace of identifier `foo` with identifier`bar`".

That could be derived, however, by a particularly smart parser [1]. Alternately, that itself could be embedded in the comment for patches sourced from darcs. Of course, that means patches from others are less commutable than from other darcs users, but that's the price you'd pay for relying on the user to explicitly note a token rename.

  [1] An example: http://minnie.tuhs.org/Programs/Ctcompare/index.html

As for "darcs mv", that can be derived from the before/after pictures of the trees.

> And darcs is specifically intended to support additional kinds of patches.

Anything missing out of what I listed above? (darcs has adddir and addfile, IIRC, but those are trivially discovered via inspection of the trees as well, I think.)

> Anyway, the point is that, in the darcs world, it is NOT possible to
> reconstruct a patch from the before and after trees.

Not yet, and maybe not ever, but I think we can certainly get closer to discovering what the coder was thinking during a changeset.

Ray