Hi, Michael Olney wrote:
> I've read the UCLA tech report on Darcs patch theory > (http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jjacobson/patch-theory/), and it seems > like an interesting basis for version control. However, it's not > clear to me what the benefits of the theory are in practical terms. > Is anyone able to explain why might one prefer this model over those > that seem to underly the more mainstream systems? I'd point to two benefits. Cheap cherry-picking: In darcs, cherry-picking is a first-class operation that is easy to use and doesn't make your life harder later. In other version control systems, it generally creates a fresh commit that then has to be merged later. See http://wiki.darcs.net/DifferencesFromOtherDVCS for more background on this. Semantic patches: Because darcs is patch-centric (the most important objects are descriptions of the changes between repository states, rather than the states themselves), it allows for more intelligent descriptions of what changed in a patch, which in turn give you better merges. However, the only example we have of that at the moment is "token replace" which is useful for renaming things but not much else, so you don't get as much benefit from this as we'd like. Maybe some day.. Ganesh =============================================================================== Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.credit-suisse.com/legal/en/disclaimer_email_ib.html =============================================================================== _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
