[darcs-users] Tips on a large merge, the big "initial import" takes forever

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 11:06:46PM +0100, Nicolas Pouillard wrote:
> That's  a  case  where having some kind disjunctive tag point in history could
> be good (what's hell is that thing...).
> 
> Let's  imagine  that  one  can  extend  "a  posteriori" a darcs tag, by giving
> another history that ends-up in the same context.
> 
> So  instead  of  having  just  patches  as  dependencies,  a  tag  could  have
> alternatives of patches.
> 
> That's  currently  just  a  rough  idea,  but  I  really  think  that a lot of
> interesting use cases wait behind this.
>
> For  instance  that would provide a better way for representing checkpoints. A
> checkpoint  will  be  an alternative history (as one single big patch), to the
> classical history.

I'd rather eliminate checkpoints (which is what darcs-2 does, for the
hashed and darcs-2 formats).

> This  also  would help people trying to incrementally convert their history. A
> team  could  start  using darcs by importing a snapshot of their project (as a
> few  patches),  instead  of  converting  history.  Indeed  for  some  reasons,
> converting  history  can  be  harder  than  expected. So this team could start
> patching, and then later on, plug their old history back.
> 
> Any thoughts about this?

This sounds overly-complicated to me.

I know this is a common sort of request, wanting to add history onto the
back end of a project.  Currently this can be done with an ugly hack, you
just need to define the same tag in both cases (with same name and date),
and ensure that your repositories are broken on that tag.  I don't,
however, see a good reason to elevate this ugly hack to a feature.  How
would doing so make it less ugly?
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University
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