pbranches style plugin

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ben Finney writes:

 > I work with several Darcs enthusiasts who have tried to explain what it
 > is they like about the system,

A lot of Darcs users don't really care about the model of changes,
beyond "it's cool and very simple".  What they like is the UI,
especially the ability to decide hunk by hunk which changes to record
in which patch, but also the relatively small set of commands (most of
which have lots of options, but once you've set the defaults to your
liking, you rarely have to change them).  If your coworkers can't
explain what they like about "patch theory", maybe to a great extent
they fall into that category?

 > but its model of changes seems even more intangible than Git and
 > doesn't sound at all attractive.

That seems very strange to me.  What could be more tangible than "a
change is a patch"?  Do you mean something like "Darcs's model of
revisions as (partially ordered) sets of changes seems intangible"?
Or that the notion of "branch history" is very fuzzy (in fact, it's
merely the time order of patches in the branch, and doesn't take
merging and such into account)?

Darcs people tend not to say it that way (the prophets of Darcs tend
to speak very abstractly about patches, taking them as the elements in
an operator algebra, rather than thinking about them as diffs and
other changes to workspaces).  But that's really what's going on IMO.
I bet exploiting partially ordered sets of patches is what Robert is
thinking about, given the context of people explaining that cross-
thread dependencies in looms get in the way in some use cases.