Michael Olney wrote: >> The key property is that any given set of patches, you get the same >> repository state no matter what order those patches are currently >> stored in. That underpins the "first-class cherry-picking" and "no >> fresh commit >> for merges" that darcs has and other VCS systems don't. > > I guess I'm not clear as to who these proofs are supposed to > convince, and of what.
Concretely, if you unpull and pull patches in an arbitary order in a repository (from any remote source), getting to some given set of patches X, the result will be the same no matter what order you do those unpulls and pulls. > Without a more specific interpretation of the > theory or more properties it doesn't seem possible to prove, for > example, that I'm not going to lose any important information during > the merging process. The unique result of the merging/commuting process might indeed be nonsense. A separate aspect of formalising a VCS might be to provide some formal definition of what it means to keep "important information", but I think that's mostly orthogonal to the issue of commuting and merging, and not so specific to darcs. For example I think if you could prove that diff3 based merging doesn't lose information in some sense, that result could be adapted to darcs hunk patches. Ganesh =============================================================================== Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.credit-suisse.com/legal/en/disclaimer_email_ib.html =============================================================================== _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list darcs-users@darcs.net http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
