Subject: Re: [darcs-devel] Darcs and git: plan of action

From: David Roundy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 07:05:26 -0400

On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 06:42:11PM -0700, Ray Lee wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-04-18 at 21:05 -0400, Kevin Smith wrote:
> > You could guess, but that's not good enough for darcs to be able to
> > reliably commute the patches later.
>
> Who said anything about guessing? If a user replaces all instances of
> foo with bar, that's as close to proof as you can ever get, without
> recording intent of the user at the time it's done. Now, I realize that
> darcs *does* record intent, but I claim that's immaterial.

The problem is, how do you know how to define a token? That's also included
in a darcs patch.  And a darcs user may choose not to use a replace patch,
if (for example) he's renaming a local variable, since he might not want to
mess with other functions in the same file.

Guessing the author's intent cannot reliably reproduce the author's stated
intent.  Either we need to include that information in one form or another
(and in one location or another), or we've got to simply disallow replaces
(and moves?) when interacting with git.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net