Hi,
Should amend-record be the same as unrecord/record (of the same changes)?
I suspect that most people would expect it to be so, and indeed we have
previously fixed bugs where it was not the case, e.g.
http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1272
However, there turn out to be very small examples where it is not the
case, and in fact with the current way amend-record works it's actually
impossible.
The reason is that amend-record uses a local coalescing operation on
patches that is ignorant of repo state, whereas unrecord/record re-diffs
actual repo states. In the following test case:
state 1 2 3
contents g => a => g
g g
If we go from state 1 to state 2 to state 3, we record insertion of "a" at
line 1 followed by change of "a" -> "g" at line 1. At no stage is line 2
involved, so there only possible local coalescing gives us insertion of
"g" at line 1.
But if we diff states 1 and 3 directly, the diff algorithm picks insertion
of "g" at line 2. There's no prospect of tweaking the diff algorithm: if
we change state 2 to ["g", "a"] instead, then coalescing gives us
insertion of "g" at line 2 by the same reasoning.
I have more complicated examples (but only very slightly more complicated)
where the amend-recorded diff is larger than the freshly recorded diff,
for similar reasons; a line which is not touched in the sequence of
patches still tweaks the diff.
So the question is whether this matters or not. My feeling is that it
does, for the reasons that Simon Marlow mentioned in the aforementioned
bug, and particularly where the amend-recorded diff is larger than the
freshly recorded one.
To fix this, I think we would need to make amend-record more aware of file
contents, perhaps by making the code path very similar to what
unrecord/record would do, or perhaps a bit more subtly by augmenting the
existing coalescing code.
This question also has implications for the hunk editing feature that Rob
Hoelz has been working on for a while, which I've also been looking at a
bit recently, so I'm mostly in favour of having a better coalesce
operation, if feasible.
Cheers,
Ganesh
_______________________________________________
darcs-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
