The biggest limitation of darcs' patch theory is that the commutation 
between patches is not defined semantically, but only syntactically. This is 
because any semantical treatment of patches is undecidable. We partially 
deal with that undecidability by using tests. 

That's why I propose to add a --add-deps-by-tests flag to record (and amend-
record). When recording a patch x with that flag, darcs would try to commute 
each patch between x and the last tag (or some other chosen patch) past x, 
then unpull it and run tests. If the tests fail, then x depends on that 
patch. While it would require a not-too slow testsuite, that system would be 
a real robustness argument for darcs' cherry-picking: whenever you do 
cherry-picking, you end up with a merge of to branches which pass the tests 
(even though the merge itself could well not pass).

What do you think?


_______________________________________________
darcs-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users

Reply via email to