Re: A modest proposal -- We need a patch penguin

Rik van Riel
2002-01-30T17:02:38Z

On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 07:35:03PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >
> > > How much of the out order stuff goes away if you could send changes
> > > out of order as long as they did not overlap (touch the same files)?
> >
> > could this be made: 'as long as they do not touch the same lines of code,
> > taking 3 lines of context into account'? (ie. unified diff definition of
> > 'collisions' context.)
>
> No. What you described is diff/patch. We have that already and if it
> really worked in all the cases there would be no need for BitKeeper to
> exist. I'll be the first to admit that BK is too pedantic about
> change ordering and atomicity, but you need to see that there is a
> spectrum and if we slid BK over to what you described it would be a
> meaningless tool,

OK, so why not put the boundary at the same point as where
bitkeeper still manages to automatically merge branches and
where it gives up ?

(this seems to be somewhat finer grained than the whole-file
level, but more picky and intelligent than patch/diff)

regards,

Rik
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