[darcs-users] How to you handle content-related dependencies?

[Miles Gould]

On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Steffen Schuldenzucker
<sschuldenzucker at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> using darcs to write my bachelor thesis, I repeatedly hit the following
> problem: When I write a proof that refers to some other theorem, I want to
> make sure that this theorem does actually exist.
> When managing a source code repository, the problem should be similar. In
> short, I want to specifiy dependencies which guarantee that pulling my patch
> will lead to a consistent state again.

I think it's worth asking how much of an actual *problem* you've been
finding this. Do you often find yourself pulling patches and getting a
non-compiling source tree because of some missing dependency? How much
time have you wasted because of this issue?

If the answers are "rarely" and "little", then you're probably best
off not bothering about it, and dealing with problems as they arise.
If, on the other hand, it's a constant annoyance and massive
time-sink, then you might be better off abandoning darcs and switching
to a VCS that fits your development style better. It looks like all
the workarounds will involve some work on your part that you probably
don't have time for - bachelor theses are pretty time-constrained at
all the universities I've been involved with, so I expect they are at
yours too.

If you are wasting a lot of time on this, I for one would be very
interested if you could write up a blog post or something about it
(maybe after your thesis is submitted!). I'm not aware of anyone who's
found darcs' underapproximation of dependencies to be a problem in
practice, and it would be interesting to know what it is about your
development style that makes it a problem for you.

Miles.