Re: Marginal features

David Roundy wrote:

> On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 09:05:44PM -0700, Bram Cohen wrote:
> > Then there are the marginal features, which might or might not be good
> > ideas, here are some of them -
> >
> > moving the root - the easiest way to provide directory rename
> > functionality is to treat the root as special. We implemented it this way
> > in Codeville, and didn't think much of it, but it turns out that
> > precisely this functionality is needed to import one project into another
> > one as a subdirectory, so we now think this functionality is a good idea
> > and will be supporting it in the future
>
> I've thought about this (and even talked about it), but it never seemed
> like it would be worth implementing.  Darcs always stores filenames with a
> preceding ./ partly so we could perhaps later "rename" the root to be
> something like subproject/, but I never could convince myself that this
> would actually be useful.  Nor did I figure out how exactly it would work.

The current plan for Codeville is to make it so that exactly one of the
versioned directories is blessed as the current root, and that if after a
merge more than one directory or none of them is blessed as the current
root then that's treated as a conflict case. It makes a bunch of fun extra
conflict cases for directory renames, but isn't conceptually all that
hard.

There are already a bunch of fun directory rename conflicts by the way,
like when one person makes directory A go below directory B, and another
person makes directory B go below directory A. Codeville presents these
sorts of conflicts via name mangling.

-Bram