Theory/Motivation

Say you have the repository Stable with three patches (let’s call them A, B and C) in it:

Stable: A B C

You create a development branch based on that:

Devel: A B C

You add stuff to your development branch:

Devel: A B C D E F

Now you notice that F is an important bugfix that should go into the next stable release. But if you pull it from Devel to Stable, darcs has to find out which patches it should pull together with F. Maybe F depends on some stuff you added with D, or with E?

Darcs can use the Patch Theory to find out if a patch depends on another. In the case above, it will try to use the rules of the patch theory to commute (i.e. “swap”) the patch F backwards. First it tries to see if E and F can be commuted. If they can, it knows the F does not depend on E:

Devel: A B C D F E

It then tries to commute D and F to see whether F depends on D. If that works, all is well, and darcs can just pull F and be happy. If that does not work, darcs knows that F depends on D, and has to pull both patches.

Since this reordering is based on a sound theory of patches, it is guaranteed that darcs will find the minimal set of patches it has to pull to satisfy the dependencies of any patch you requested, without asking you what other patches it needs.

There’s a bad side, of course. The patch theory works on a purely textual level. It can only find out that two patches depend on each other if they affect the same portions of text. So, while darcs will detect the relationship between two patches that modify the same line of code, it will not, for example, detect the relation between changes such as one which adds a call to a function, and the other which checks the returned value of this function, unless the two patches happen to fall in the same region of text.

But semantic dependencies are beyond the automatism of darcs. If you add a new function in one patch and call it in another, darcs won’t be able to find this dependency. Darcs provides some extensions to add such explicit dependencies by hand, but to find such things automatically, it would need a parser for the programming language (at least).

Example shows a simple example of a merge without conflicts.

Ask questions on the .