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

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Apr 19, 2005, 16:49 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504190943060.19286@ppc970.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <426532D5.3040306@tupshin.com>

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005, Tupshin Harper wrote:

> 
> I suspect that any use of wildcards in a new format would be impossible 
> for darcs since it wouldn't allow darcs to construct dependencies, 
> though I'll leave it to david to respond to that.

Note that git _does_ very efficiently (and I mean _very_) expose the changed files.

So if this kind of darcs patch is always the same pattern just repeated over <n> files, then you really don't need to even list the files at all. Git gives you a very efficient file listing by just doing a "diff-tree" (which does not diff the _contents_ - it really just gives you a pretty much zero-cost "which files changed" listing).

So that combination would be 100% reliable _if_ you always split up darcs patches to "common elements".

And note that there does not have to be a 1:1 relationship between a git commit and a darcs patch. For example, say that you have a darcs patch that does a combination of "change token x to token y in 100 files" and "rename file a into b". I don't know if you do those kind of "combination patches" at all, but if you do, why not just split them up into two? That way the list of files changed _does_ 100% determine the list of files for the token exchange.

		Linus