Re: Marginal features

On Sat, May 07, 2005 at 11:29:41PM +0100, Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> On Sat, 7 May 2005, David Roundy wrote:
> 
> > > [renaming the root]
> >
> > 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.
> 
> How else would you build a repo that merges two subrepos and can still
> pull new patches from each easily?

If each of the repos had all of their contents stored within a
subdirectory, you could do this without a special feature.  In other words,
if you plan ahead, you don't need a special "root directory" feature,
although you have to deal with the fact that in each of the individual
repos everything's in a subdirectory.

So this is mostly a feature for people/groups who don't plan on merging
repositories, and then decide later that it would be a good idea.  I've
never run across this scenario, and am not sure how common it would be, or
whether it would ever actually be a good idea.

> > > [convergence - merging identical patches]
> >
> > This is a common complaint about darcs, and is a tough problem.  I
> > think the best solution is to *not* treat the patches as having
> > identical identities, but in the conflict resolution to recognize what
> > the user has tried to do and suggest a default "trivial" resolution.
> > I'd like to have a distinction in a future darcs between "unresolved
> > conflicts" and "resolved conflicts".  The latter would be actual
> > conflicts, but ones for which darcs was able to suggest a reasonable
> > resolution.  Thus "identical" patches would fall into the latter
> > category.  It'd still be a conflict and would require a resolution
> > patch, but the user would get a nice message like "We were able to
> > resolve 5 conflicts in foo.cpp, please record if this is satisfactory."
> 
> If we had two independent repos A and B that converged on the same tree
> into C, and then there were future patches in say A, could they be pulled
> into C without causing further conflicts?

There would be future conflicts if repos A and B refuse to pull the
conflict resolution patch.  But I'm not sure why they'd do that, and if you
have developers that don't communicate, you've got more serious conflicts
than those that show up in repository C.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net