Re: Marginal features

On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 03:33:37PM +0100, Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> That wasn't the precise scenario I was thinking of, it was just the
> easiest way to explain it. In fact I have a few real use cases for a
> feature that avoided future conflicts:
> 
>  - Two different people convert a CVS repository and do lots of work
> independently, then want to merge up. [...]
...
>  - "Patch replacement". This is something which has come up on the darcs
> mailing list when someone wanted to push some changes upstream without
> revealing internal development history or patch names [...]

I don't want to redesign darcs around scenarios are in which you're dealing
with non-darcs sources.  It's great to be able to use darcs this way, but
it's not what it's designed for, so I don't want to add complexity to darcs
just to deal with situations where people are using darcs as a client for
another revision control system.

As far as transparently removing history, that's not somewhere I really
want to go.  There's already unrecord+record which will allow you to do
this (provided you haven't disseminated your partches), and I do like the
idea of creating a "superpatch" which will hide subpatches in the
interface, it shouldn't actually eliminate those patches--that would cause
difficulties.  Darcs already allows you to modify the history more than any
other decent SCM (arch doesn't count).
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net