Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
On 2008 Aug 3, at 19:16, Ben Franksen wrote:
The naive way to emulate your split feature would be to create a branch where you delete all the stuff you don't want and then maybe move the subproject to a new directory (nearer the top-level). This doesn't work, however, at least not in practice. This is because deletion of a file conflicts with a change to the same file which leads to a huge amount of conflicts each time you pull from the old combined repo. And the reason you get these conflicts is that in darcs a file always gets emptied before deletion, and this is because changing a file depends on its existence in the first place. I proposed to change this and allow changes to non-existing files, so called 'ghosts'. This has a number of interesting consequences, among them that you could delete as many files as you want and will never again get a conflict with changes to those files (that is, unless you explicitly 'resurrect' the ghost).
Unfortunately few people (and none of the core-developers) seemed to be interested :( The small thread that developed on the darcs-users list should still be available in the archives if you are interested in the details.
I would suggest that they'd be more interested if you provided code; if they have no need for your proposal they're unlikely to devote time to coding it.
You are suggesting that I am expecting others to devote time to code proposals of mine. I don't know where you get this idea. I am used to discuss the merits of a new feature, especially one so far-reaching, before starting to unilaterally throw code at a project. Your own style of collaboration might be different, though. Anyway, I would suggest that you add something of interest rather than patronizing people with dubious 'suggestions'. Cheers Ben