Daniel Carrera writes: > I was hoping that we would some example to justify the claim that the > theory of patches is somehow better than 3-way merge.
Well, that's what I've been asking for, too. If I had seen a concrete, easy to present example, believe me, I'd dig it up. I think one hand-wavy thing is that Darcs has access to all of the history between the common ancestor and the divergent branches. So Darcs can *compute* the offsets and fuzz (well, Darcs hunks can't fuzz, but something like that maybe?) That clearly beats patch. Whether the additional information allows us to beat 3-way merge, I'm don't know. I think one important psychological aspect that hasn't been mentioned yet is that sometimes you think ahistorically, in terms of patches (changesets, features), and sometimes you think historically (in terms of revisions and branches). And most people are biased one way or the other. I'm most active as a release manager; history is very important to me, while I hate patches and features because I've never seen a feature that didn't bring more than its share of bugs. ;-) So I think historically-oriented people, even folks who are maintaining stacks of patches a la Andrew Morton (who invented 'quilt'), are likely to favor a snapshot-oriented system that allows explicit manipulation of the history DAG. Ie, git. While people who think in terms of "recombinant features" and don't manage releases are likely to prefer changeset oriented systems like Darcs and (original) Arch. If managing patches are the way you think about version, then git is going to make no sense at all, and Darcs is peaches and cream. If traversing a DAG is your view of how the world works, then git is the obvious way to go, and Darcs's focus on patches seems quaint at best. I don't think you dare phrase it this way in front of those who haven't had a couple doses of the electric Kool-Aid, but you could say that Darcs even provides an "algebra of features". _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
