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1185.1.29
by Robert Collins
merge merge tweaks from aaron, which includes latest .dev |
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Darcs compared to Arch |
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Simpler to use; perhaps harder to completely understand. |
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Always local; always fast. |
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Patch commution is slow and perhaps doesn't clearly do what people |
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want. |
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Too slow! |
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Can't reliably get back to any previous point. Explicitly not |
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addressing source archive/librarian function. |
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Loads everything into memory. |
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Written in Haskell. |
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A really simple pre-commit check hook is remarkably useful. |
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http://www.scannedinavian.org/DarcsWiki/DifferencesFromArch |
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Sometimes useful to be able to set email per-branch, for people who |
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work on different projects under different personas. |
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Token replace |
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Very cute; possibly handy; not absolutely necessary in most places. |
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Somewhat limited by the requirement that it be reversible. |
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This is one of very few cases where it does seem necessary that we |
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store deltas, rather than tree states. But that seems to cause other |
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problems in terms of being able to reliably sign revisions. |
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This can perhaps be inferred by a smart 3-way merge tool. Certainly |
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you could have it do sub-line merges. |
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Partial commit |
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darcs allows you to commit only some of the changes to a single file. |
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This is like the common feature of commiting only a subset of changed |
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files, but taken to a higher level. |
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It is useful more often than one might think: it is common to fix some |
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documentation 'on the wing' and while strictly it should be in a |
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separate commit it is not always worth the hassle to back out changes, |
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fix the docs, then do the real change. Similarly for making a |
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separate branch. |
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Although the idea is very good, the current darcs implementation is |
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limited to selecting by patch hunk, which means that neighbouring |
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changes cannot be separated. Fixing this probably means having some |
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kind of pluggable GUI to build the file-to-be-committed or an edited |
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patch, possibly using something like meld, emacs, or dirdiff. Another |
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approach some people might like is editing the diff file to chop out |
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hunks. |
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I don't think this needs to be on by default, as it is in darcs. It |
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is usual to commit all the changes. |
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For this to work safely, it is good to have a commit hook that |
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builds/tests the tree. Of course this needs to be evaluated against |
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the tree as it will be committed (taking account of partial commits), |
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not the working tree. |
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Schwern |
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------- |
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* http://www.scannedinavian.org/DarcsWiki/SchwernLikesDarcs |
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* http://www.scannedinavian.org/DarcsWiki/SchwernHatesDarcs |
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I think we hit most of these; more evidence for the hypothesis that |
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what people really like about darcs is the simple interface not the |
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patch-commutation model. |