Thanks so much for this link, this is exactly the kind of analysis I was hoping for. Clearly this is all a bit FUD, and darcs which gets this right, is trying too hard. I wonder how fast the general merge algo that darcs is using to get this right is? <trollface>
Matt's point is that while some algorithms will fix this particular case, you can still come up with a different edge case which makes it break. The whole "prefect merge tool" was very popular five years ago (during git's and mercurial's infancy), but it didn't lead anywhere.
Simple merges strategy are "good enough" in practice.
Matt's point is that they've chosen a system that makes it really hard to get that last 10%.
"We have tried to draw spirals using cartesian coordinates, what we have gets us 90% there, but there are infinities and edge cases involved in getting a perfect spiral. The equations describing them would get so complicated it's just not worth it."
What we have in BitKeeper is the equivalent of polar coordinates... it makes drawing spirals much, much easier ;)
Do you have a page describing how that would differ? The bk website seems awfully outdated: there's no mention of the existence of other DVCS, there's a quote from MySQL being happy with bk -- they switched to bazaar two years ago --, etc..
I would be nice if you could give some examples where bk gets the merge right while git doesn't.
I'd appreciate an explanation of your approach too, it would be great to know how we could "adjust our coordinates" to take care of this issue without loosing speed, but gaining accuracy.
I suspect what you'll find is changing the base in this way, while fixing this problem would introduce other problems that occur much more regularly, but I hope I'm wrong.
You're wrong, but unfortunately I'm not at liberty to describe how bk does merges... it's part of the "secret sauce". i am truley sorry for your lots...
