Declan Naughton wrote: > Ok. I can see how Darcs is brilliant (the best) for keeping track of > changes, but on what planet would we not like our RCS to provide a > history of previous versions?
Revision control tools from the history-of-previous-versions school force you to work with your repository as a linear, directed sequence of changes. When several developers are working independently, this forces you to create new intermediate versions for no reason other than to handle the merging of those changes (in some arbitrary order) into the head. With Darcs, patches can be handled in more than one order, so there's more than one potential history. If you want to see how a given repository looks in the absence of the last N patches, you can do it with Darcs by cherry-picking the patches you want in, or by reversing the ones you want excluded. You're not restricted to just the last N patches, though; you can select a change set which excludes any patch or patches you want. That lets you build whichever snapshot or snapshots you want on the fly. Viewing a project as a sequence of snapshots is an artifact of working in a non-distributed fashion. In the distributed case, many patches can be written independently. There's no one canonical way to order those patches so as to make up a single, linear history which didn't exist in the first place. Tools like CVS force you to construct a fake history, but Darcs doesn't. Keith Browne [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
