(Anyone who wants to follow the conversation should probably read my replies to Max Battcher and Petr Rockai before this one.)
Eric Kow <[email protected]> wrote: > I'd particularly appreciate it if we could summarise any results from > this on the bug tracker in the end > http://bugs.darcs.net/issue555 That would be useful, certainly, but I'm exciting enough opposition that I don't feel I'm the best person for summarising any of this. > Another option to consider: though this may be straying from the idea of > implementing a standalone tool, but it seems that darcs-branch could > outsource any clever bits to the Darcs library (and that we'd have to > think carefully through extensions to the Darcs library and not just > hashed-storage to make this work). Agreed. In fact, here is a proposal: To greatly simplify any implementation of in-repo branching, we make Darcs[library] itself able to handle having multiple (pristine,inventory) pairs, addressable by branch name, with one of the branches also 'owning' the working copy. As in the proposal, the magic of hashed_storage makes this work fairly nicely. We also extend all actions that take a repository to also take a branch name (defaulting to whichever one 'owns' the working copy), which simply dictates the root (pristine,inventory) to use. Those commands that affect the working directory will need altering to only do so when they are affecting the relevant branch, but many actions already update the working copy in a separate step, so that should be easy. With that done, pushing and pulling between branches works fairly naturally and without having anything second-guess Darcs patch, inventory and tag handling. Further, all of the built-in darcs commands will then work across branches, without pain. Then, we can still have the outside-of-darcs tool for: * Managing branches * Synchronising knowledge-of-branches between repositories * Switching between branches (which should be simplified by the fact that Darcs is aware of them) G. _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
