Re: [Gnu-arch-users] into the ether again: wd factor

[Graham Hughes]

As mentioned, darcs does a very good job here with this.  There are
other, similar efforts--I think the one that most fits the arch workflow
model is something like 'bzr shelve' which is a Bazaar-NG extension that
allows you to reversibly remove changes to the working directory in the
fashion you suggest.  Now, 'bzr shelve' is very simplistic and has
serious correctness weaknesses (doesn't handle additions of files for
sure, probably can't deal with renames or deletes) and when I looked
into doing this last I planned on writing something that could split an
arch changeset into two halves; sadly that came to nothing.  I still
think that a basic tool like this could be useful.

I would really, really like this feature.  I will suggest that finer
grained diffs, though confusing as diffs, are more valuable for these
purposes; GNU diff, as I recall, has a tendency to group chunks together
if they're sufficiently close which is suboptimal for these purposes.

And, in opposition to Andrew, my experience has been that the most
primitive interface is actually okay for this so long as the
functionality is there; the darcs interface has the form 'here's a
chunk, please press y if you'd like it in your patch', as does bzr
shelve, and this is quite useful in itself.

Graham