On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 12:59:26 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > > What do hg and git do differently that makes their local branching > > cheaper? Simply because it's done within a single repo, and therefore > > you only ever have one copy of the working tree? > > "Ever" is too strong, but "few workspaces" is important to me, yes, > though YMMV. Darcs branches are also conceptually expensive because I > have to decide where to put them, and I have to remember where they > are when I want to refer to them.
Thanks for clarifying that! So as I understand it, this being purely a UI issue. We've long valued the conceptual simplicity of darcs (not introducing too many commands) over the extra convenience of 'local' branching. This is why we had marked http://bugs.darcs.net/issue555 as a wont-fix. On the other hand, I've had a feeling that the clamor for local branches wasn't entirely unwarranted, and in my experiments with git, do feel that they provide a certain comfort. Your explanation is pushing me a bit more towards the side of maybe-will-fix-after-all. [I've taken the liberty of re-ordering your email by putting this below] > Darcs could probably implement cheap in-repo branches using the > existing low-level machinery of dependencies, but it would be a hack > and would also probably complicate the implementation of the mainline > branch. Even simpler than that, one could imagine a wrapper that creates a separate _darcs directory per branch (say .darcs.master, .darcs.foo, .darcs.bar) and symlinks the desired branch to _darcs. Switching from branch to branch is a matter of switching the symlink (I have left out perhaps the crucial detail of what to do with the working directory). Exchanging patches between branches could involve creating a temporary directory, and linking the .darcs directory in. This is a clunky and non-portable implementation, and I don't mean to suggest that this is actually how we should do it. But I think it illustrates what my currently limited understanding of local branching to be, should we ever commit to implementing something like that. -- Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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