[darcs-users] Git v. Darcs: megapatches and 'darcs shunt'

[Isaac Dupree]

On 01/21/11 08:24, Eric Kow wrote:
> ...I just figured darcs pull
> --reorder would basically work like a darcs push might (or the
> other repository pulling your patches) modulo working directory.

Hmm interesting.  If that's the semantics we want it could maybe be 
called darcs pull --under.  For the reasons I described before though, 
I'm not sure whether that merging strategy is disciplined enough to 
produce the results that people will actually want.  (Which maybe is a 
critique of darcs-pull using it in the normal way too!  But, well... :)

 From a UI point of view, I might start by thinking about an optimize 
command.  I'm thinking it'd be clearly nice to have even if pull has a 
similar operation, and once we have it (or see the challenges in doing 
it), we'll be able to see more clearly whether we also want a pull flag 
and what it is that we'd want.  I hope there aren't a proliferation of 
reordering strategies that we end up wanting.

(There exists a darcs optimize --reorder-patches -- the manual says it 
reduces context size and possibly increases other performance, I don't 
remember more, but I'm sure someone in the Darcs community does remember 
what kind of reordering/strategies it does. And does it stop at tags? 
At least I'm mentioning it so we can name the hypothetical new 
"optimize" subcommand better.)

of course, this speculating doesn't get any code done by itself :)

-Isaac