Hi, On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 13:43:58 +0100, Jean-Philippe Bernardy wrote: > It seems that the problem of conflicting patches has been solved in darcs 2.x, > but some time ago I had my very own "revolutionary" idea to solve the problem > of > conflicts in darcs 1.0: > > There should be no conflicting patches!
Very interesting. Thanks very much for sharing that! > As part of a master-level project, two students of mine have implemented > this idea in a prototype [1], and the report can be found here [2]. Ah-hah! I'm quite interested in seeing students working on darcs/camp research and or implementation. Good to see that such an exercise is viable. > We do not have the intention to develop the prototype any further (for > the moment at least), but we thought you might be interested in at least > taking > a look at the work and the underlying ideas. We'll be happy to answer > questions > if you have any. First (of two) questions: what, in a nutshell, does it mean not to have any conflicts? Clearly, there can be conflicting situations (i.e. two people edit different parts of a file). How roughly does your idea cope with them? As you can see, I haven't yet had the chance to read the paper, but was hoping for a little bit more of a taster (now that I've had the teaser) Second question. The paper says: | Darcs will flag this scenario as a conflict, i.e. it cannot represent such a | merge. The result of a merge in Darcs is dependent on the order that the | changes are applied, Darcs will try all possible “non conflicting” permutations | of the changes which will result, in the worst case, in exponential complexity. What does this mean, please? I thought the whole point of the darcs approach to conflicts is that it be completely independent of order (i.e. we cancel out both patches). As a more general remark, I was glad to see your reference to Lippe 2002 in the paper, that is, to the idea of patch commutation expressed outside of the darcs world (and pre-dating David's darcs work?). I would love to see the darcs/camp community link up a bit more with researchers working in this area, but (1) I don't know what "this area" is and (2) I don't know who the right people are. Do you have any thoughts on what people we should be trying to talk to (names? sub-discliplines? research topics?). If I'm not mistaken, the current (darcs) assesment on pre-existing work is that none of it deals with conflicts in any way, which doesn't help us much. I once tried to get some connections going between darcs folks and the Libresource/so6 folks (notably, Pascal Molli <http://www.loria.fr/~molli>, but that has not taken off yet. (Pascal Molli seems to be working on collaborative distributed systems. I guess an example application might be text editors where different people are writing at the same time?) Many thanks! -- Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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