Cutting the CC list further.
On Fri, 10 Dec 2010, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
n.b. GHC Users cut because it doesn't know me and I don't have time to
introduce myself. :-)
Ganesh Sittampalam writes:
> darcs rebase is essentially about giving up on the recombinant patching
> because that's not working out for whatever reason. It's primarily
> intended as an alternative to manually reapplying patches to new branches
OK. I'm still not sure it's a good name. Although git rebase is
deprecated for certain use cases by everybody, and considered criminal
in any usage by a few, nevertheless it's an operation that many people
use very frequently. Such a mode of operation is an alternative to
patch queues (quilt, stacked git, Mercurial queues, bzr pipelines).
I get the impression that darcs rebase is not intended to be used that
way. If so, the command name might want to be different. It's a
tough call; if the implementation is basically the same, some people
will complain "it works (implementation) just like git rebase, why
don't you just call it 'rebase'?" OTOH, if the workflow differs,
other people will complain, "it doesn't work (workflow) at all like
git rebase; why does darcs suck so much?" We don't need that!
The basic behaviour will be somewhat similar, modulo the fact that we're
working with trees rather than patches, and you ought to be able to use it
for all the things you would use git rebase for. The main difference would
be that there are preferred alternatives in darcs for many of those
things, at least in the cases where they work out well. So to some extent
this may "just" be a matter of documentation.
Mercurial calls its rebase extension "transplant"; bzr's is "rewrite"
(but it provides a command named "rebase", IIRC). Another possibility
for the darcs command would be "reorder", I think (what does "base"
mean in Darcs, anyway?)
In essence the "base" of a patch would be its dependencies.
I think "reorder" doesn't really describe what the command will do and
would lead to confusion with reordering patches by commutation. I did
originally intend to call it "transplant" but then switch to rebase for
consistency with git.
Cheers,
Ganesh
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