[darcs-users] Fwd: Darcs Problems

[James Sleeman]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>  > This works only if you take great care that nothing unrelated accidentally 
>  > depends on your "PostgreSQL patch set".
>
> Sure, although "dependencies" are a bigger issue in Darcs (where it
> could pull in a slew of unrelated patches) than in "snapshot-oriented"
> VCSes.  Ie, this is very simple to emulate in something like git,
> where a 

To me, as somebody who would really REALLY like to use darcs more, 
dependencies are the biggest show stopper.

A big feature of Darcs was (at least so I thought) cherry picking, but 
at least in my experience, the problem of dependencies means cherry 
picking just doesn't work - 90% of the time, I can't cherry pick the 
patch I want because darcs won't let me unless I take a load of other 
largely unnecessary or undesirable ones.

I think have described this problem before, but to recap, basically 
there are times, many many many times, when I want to bring in some 
patch from some "branch repo" into some other "branch repo", only to 
find that the patch I want depends implicitly on patches I don't want, 
or simply can't accept in the other branch.  Most often, the 
"dependency" is just because of some trivial modification to a file, but 
that modification is contained in a much larger patch full of changes I 
wouldn't want.

Ideally, I'd want to be able to bring the patch in WITHOUT some or all 
of the dependencies and have darcs present any problem as a conflict 
which can be resolved in the normal manner, and for darcs to remember 
that my conflict resolution patch is a substitute for the actual 
depended on patches.


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James Sleeman