[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       mercurial
Subject:    Re: [darcs-users] Re: What's better, Darcs or Mercurial?
From:       zooko () zooko ! com
Date:       2006-02-27 13:15:09
Message-ID: 20060227131509.94F6B20448 () yumyum ! zooko ! com
[Download RAW message or body]


 Matt Mackall wrote:
>
> Mercurial does no merging internally. But with the right tools
> installed (merge and kdiff3, for example), the hgmerge script will
> automatically merge non-conflicting changes.

Matt: Thanks for inventing Mercurial.

The deep difference between darcs and Mercurial is that darcs does full-history
merging and mercurial doesn't.  I am aware of recent work to add such
functionality to Mercurial [1].  I hope that it gets support from the Mercurial
community.

An important consequence of darcs's use of complete history in merging is that
darcs knows which parts of history are irrelevant and which are necessary, and
so when you do cherry-picking it automatically includes all patches which are
syntactically necessary for the picked cherry.

This doesn't make darcs better than Mercurial -- at least not for all uses --
but it is a deep and important difference.  Darcs and Mercurial are not
functionally equivalent.

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2006-January/006132.html
_______________________________________________
Mercurial mailing list
Mercurial@selenic.com
http://selenic.com/mailman/listinfo/mercurial
[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]