[darcs-users] Hunk merging and interactive edit

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ganesh Sittampalam writes:
 > On 01/05/2011 16:57, Eric Kow wrote:

 > > I believe you're likely out of luck and that the only way to prevent
 > > this sort of coalescing is by having two separate patches after all.
 > 
 > Yeah, I'm afraid this is the case, at least in terms of interactive edit
 > itself. It's come up once or twice before, and it would be nice to find
 > a good UI to make this work, though. Suggestions welcome!

I believe it's been requested before, but I can see no value in
recording conceptually separate changes as a single patch.  This seems
like a PEBKAC to me: the user has an inconsistent model of VC.

My suggestion: split dependencies into "computed" and "explicit", and
offer an option to drag in explicit dependencies when viewing the
dependent patch.  If neither patch is complete without the other, add
dependencies in both directions (I don't know what Darcs would do in
this case, though -- I hope it would look at the patches, discover no
textual conflict, and apply both).