On 18/09/12 07:17, Kevin Quick wrote:
I don't know if I'm helping the discussion: it seems we are exploring
theoretical VCS infrastructure so I'm enjoying our semi-abstract
discourse and I may not be contributing to your goal. If that's the
case, please excuse my maunderings. :-)
While we're exploring theoretical VCS infrastructure, let me draw your
collective attention to Robin Houston's beautifully simple DVCS design:
http://bosker.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/on-editing-text/
tl;dr: patches are arrows in a category (we'll get to the objects
later); merges are pushouts; coherence of merges follows trivially by
uniqueness of colimits. I *think* this means that the merge algorithm is
constant-time in the depth of patches that need merging. The interesting
bit is that the objects are no longer linear strings of characters: to
make this design work, we have to take as our objects *partially*
ordered sets of characters. That is, this system represents conflicts
within the files themselves rather than within the patches. Merging two
conflicting patches to a file results in a file with "parallel tracks";
a possible subsequent edit is to remove one of the tracks and
relinearize the file. But this is handled straightforwardly by the
categorical formalism and requires no special-casing.
I asked Robin if he'd got round to implementing this, and apparently he
hasn't yet. Anyone feel like having a go? :-)
Miles
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