[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Fast commits

[Stefan Monnier]

>> One nice thing about the way patch-logs currently work is that mkpatch
>> and dopatch don't have to know anything (much) special about them.
> Yes, I confess that I was a bit afraid to write in black on white that this
> nice property would probably go away ...

I haven't figure it out yet, but I'm convinced there's a way to have our
cake and eat it too: represent the log info more consicely without having
to deal with nasty special diff/patch/merge ops.

I think the answer lies in redundancy: the current structure with
{arch}/.../patch-log/patch-N files would work just as before.
But we could also represent the same info with file with names
{arch}/.../patch-log/patch-N-M.
Those files would stand for all patch logs between N and M.  If their
content is uniquely defined by the content of all the patch-N to patch-M
files, then it's pretty easy to avoid conflicts.

So the only problem we have left is that we can end up with a patch-log dir
containing

        patch-3 patch-1-5 patch-3-10 patch-12

i.e. with a lot of redundancy.  But of course that's easy to solve with
the `tla compress patch-log' command which creates those patch-N-M files in
the first place.


        Stefan