At Wed, 6 Aug 2008 10:48:03 +0100, Ian Lynagh wrote:
I've just had a quick read of http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/prakash92undoing.html AFAICS this only really deals with the case where there are no conflicts, and doesn't talk about merging.
AFAIK, the papers do not talking about merging. They cover conflicts in the case where you want to remove/reorder an older patch which conflicts with a newer one. But, they do not cover conflicts happening during a merge. Based on those papers, and no knowledge of how darcs actually works I can only assume a merge works something like this: 1. find the common patches in both repos and reorder them to be at the beginning. 2. in some order apply the rest of the patches. When a conflict occurs, put some conflict markers in the file. Obviously, there are some big gaps in my understanding :) It is my hope that the framework and lemmas in those papers could be extended to include merging, etc. But, that assumes that the darcs patch theory and their multiple selective undo are sufficiently similar, which is beyond my knowledge. I have implemented some of the ideas from those papers here: http://src.seereason.com/collaborate/ Assuming the two systems are sufficiently similar, I would be interested in extending it to support darcs style merging. It seems like having a small (~200 lines) file which implements the core concepts of darcs patch theory in simplified context might be a useful way to learn about it ? Since I don't know the darcs internals or patch theory, I don't have a concept of how much is still missing (from those papers and my code), and I am not sure what parts of the darcs patch theory are giving people trouble. So, if this stuff is not valuable, I will not be suprised. But, if it is at all valuable, I would feel stupid not sharing it :) j.