On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 10:36:06AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > In fact, git has all the same issues that BK had, and for the same > fundamental reason: if you do distributed work, you have to always > "append" stuff, and that means that you can never re-order anything after > the fact.
You can, moving a patch around is just a chain of merges. [Warning, ascii "art" ahead] A merge is traditionally seen as: 1- Start with (A, B, C... are nodes/trees..., Pn are patches/changesets): /--P1->B / A \ \--P2->C 2- End with: /--P1->B / A----(P1+P2)->D \ \--P2->C where D is the merge between B and C with A as common ancestor. But you can also see the result as: /--P1->B--P2--\ / \ A D \ / \--P2->C--P1--/ i.e. you have two patch chains, one being A-P1->B-P2->D and the other A-P2->C-P1->D. I.e. you have the two patches P1 and P2 in two possible patching orders. But you can do even more amusing. Start with a patch chain: E--P3-->F--P4-->G and merge E and G with F as common ancestor. You'll then get H where E--P4-->H--P3-->G. I.e. you inverted two patches in your patch chain. Or, if you keep H instead of G as your head, you removed P3 from your patch chain. Of course you can permute blocs of patches that way by having E, F and G further away from each other. You just increase the merge conflict probability. That is, I think, the way to do quilt/arch patch handling with safe distribution and safe backtracing procedures. OG. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html