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

Larry McVoy
2002-01-30T16:45:08Z

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,
it would basically be a lot of code implementing what people already do
with diff/patch.
--
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm