Re: Darcs and git: plan of action

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Apr 18, 2005, 15:38 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504180832330.7211@ppc970.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050418122011.GA13769@abridgegame.org>

On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, David Roundy wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> I'm cc'ing you on this email, since Juliusz had some interesting ideas as
> to how darcs could interact with git, which then gave me an idea concerning
> which I'd like feedback from you.  In particular, it would make life (that
> is, life interacting back and forth with git) easier if we were to embed
> darcs patches in their entirety in the git comment block.

Hell no.

The commit _does_ specify the patch uniquely and exactly, so I really don't see the point. You can always get the patch by just doing a

	git diff $parent_tree $thistree

so putting the patch in the comment is not an option.

Then you can use the patch to index to whatever extra "darcs index" information you want to.

> As I say, it's a bit ugly, and before we explore the idea further, it would
> be nice to know if this would cause Linus to vomit in disgust and/or refuse
> patches from darcs users.

That's definitely the case. I will _not_ be taking random files etc just to keep other peoples stuff straightened up.

If you want to add a "log ID", you can certainly do that, but the data the ID refers to is _you_ data, and will not go into the git archive. So:

> Another slightly less noxious possibility would
> be to store the darcs patch as a "hidden" file, if git were given the
> concept of commit-specific files.

No, git will not track commit-specific files. There's the comment section, and that _is_ the commit-specific file. But I will refuse to take any comments that aren't just human-readable explanations, together with maybe one extra line of

	# Darcs ID: 780c057447d4feef015a905aaf6c87db894ff58c

(others will want to track _their_ PR numbers etc) and that's it. The actual darcs data that that ID refers to can obviously be maintained in _another_ git archive, but it's not one I'm going to carry about.

			Linus