Towards a conflict-free revision control system.

[Jean-Philippe Bernardy]

Hello folks,

It seems that the problem of conflicting patches has been solved in darcs 2.x,
but some time ago I had my very own "revolutionary" idea to solve the problem of
conflicts in darcs 1.0:

There should be no conflicting patches!

This might seem like an impossibility, so let me clarify: while the user *might*
observe a conflict, the system would always be happy to compose any two patches
and give a meaningful *internal* representation of the result. In
darcs parlance, it means that
all patches commute.

As part of a master-level project, two students of mine have implemented
this idea in a prototype [1], and the report can be found here [2].

We do not have the intention to develop the prototype any further (for
the moment at least), but we thought you might be interested in at least taking
a look at the work and the underlying ideas. We'll be happy to answer questions
if you have any.

Cheers,
Jean-Philippe, Anders & Petter.

[1]: http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~bernardy/focal_Code_Anders_Petter.tar.gz
[2]: http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~bernardy/AConcflictFreeVersionControlSystem.pdf