An example of what I'm thinking about, which I don't think Darcs can do (I'd love to be wrong):
Alice and Bob both branch off of master at the same point. In Alice's branch, she moves function `foo` into a different module/file. In Bob's branch, he changes `foo` to handle a new condition. Both wish to merge into master.
Whoever merges later is going to have a merge conflict, and have to resolve it manually, using their human understanding of the semantics of both changes. It's clear to me how that conflict should likely be resolved, but as long as those changes are presented as text diffs, I don't expect my VCS to be smart enough to figure that out on its own.
It would be interesting to explore other ways of representing changes, such that a computer would understand how to compose them in more situations like this.
You can quickly come up with examples of changes which conflict in a way that should probably always require human intervention: Say Alice and Bob each wish to assign the same constant to different values.
So, I don't expect that you could completely remove the need for developers to manually resolve tricky conflicts. At least, not without completely changing how we express changes to programs, which may well be a non-starter for practical purposes.
Alice and Bob both branch off of master at the same point. In Alice's branch, she moves function `foo` into a different module/file. In Bob's branch, he changes `foo` to handle a new condition. Both wish to merge into master.
Whoever merges later is going to have a merge conflict, and have to resolve it manually, using their human understanding of the semantics of both changes. It's clear to me how that conflict should likely be resolved, but as long as those changes are presented as text diffs, I don't expect my VCS to be smart enough to figure that out on its own.
It would be interesting to explore other ways of representing changes, such that a computer would understand how to compose them in more situations like this.
You can quickly come up with examples of changes which conflict in a way that should probably always require human intervention: Say Alice and Bob each wish to assign the same constant to different values.
So, I don't expect that you could completely remove the need for developers to manually resolve tricky conflicts. At least, not without completely changing how we express changes to programs, which may well be a non-starter for practical purposes.