Eric Kow <[email protected]> wrote: [...] > So darcs users have been asking about in-repo branches for a while. > [To paraphrase the design: Darcs does not become branch-aware but a separate tool alters Darcs internal state to simulate it.]
As much as I don't want to kill a chance at having branches in Darcs, I think this approach would be wrong. I think the apparent simplicity is that of an incomplete design rather than that of something that is actually simple.. So I'll list some problems: 1. When you unpull old patches or reorder patches, Darcs alters existing patch files. This will break other branches that share the same files. 2. Similarly, when you pull patches in different contexts, you end up with slightly-different patches with the same name. 3. With enough unpulling on one branch, you probably break the root for another branch, by removing the shared inventory behind the head. 4. Pushing and pulling between branches would be very hard to implement without heavy Darcs involvement. The method in the proposal will not work, as Darcs in either branch can't necessarily understand the context produced by the other branch. 5. Updating the working copy correctly for many branch operations entails knowing how to handle all of the darcs patches that are different between the branches. Even if you force the user to have no working copy changes, what about the unversioned extra files, especially in renamed folders? 6. As noted in the proposal, it's not known how to make it play nicely with lazy fetching. 7. The branch-knowledge synchronisation requires almost as much knowledge about how to handle remote Darcs repos as Darcs has. So, I think I'd rather not have branches than have a strange hybrid with all sorts of gotchas. Each issue can probably be individually addressed, but I don't believe this approach will ever lead to sensible and intuitive branching, in the same way a system built in to Darcs could. G. _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
