On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 08:39:43AM +1100, William Uther wrote: > On 17/01/2008, at 11:45 PM, Ian Lynagh wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 01:57:23PM +1100, William Uther wrote: > >> If I have two Darcs workspaces, each of which have the same set of > >> patches, but in different orders, should these workspaces be > >> identical (even in the presence of conflicts)? > > > > The pristine trees should be, but the way the conflicts are marked in > > the working directory need not be. > > In OT theory, a set of patches that are all transformed to apply should > result in _identical_ output, regardless of order. If the output really > is identical, then shouldn't the conflicts be marked up in the same way? > My understanding from this that the merger patches are NOT identical. > > You claim that this isn't a problem - i.e. you seem to be claiming that > merger patches do not need to obey the same correctness requirements > as normal patches. Can you point me to a formal justification for this?
The patches aren't identical because they're in a different order. It's perfectly normal in darcs that changes in different order are described by different patches--in fact it's the basis of the whole system. If you reorder the changes into the same order, then the patches are the same. Merger patches do obey precisely the same correctness requirements as any normal patches. The conflict marking does depend on the order of changes in the repository, but this doesn't really matter, since conflict-marking is not fundamental to how darcs works. It's something that's done to the working directory for the convenience of the user. We could remove this feature and darcs would be just as correct (although rather more awkward to use). -- David Roundy Department of Physics Oregon State University _______________________________________________ darcs-devel mailing list darcs-devel@darcs.net http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-devel
