Comparison with Git, Mercurial or Darcs?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Daniel Carrera writes:
 > On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 8:22 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
 > > You won't.  It's not interesting to patch theorists or Darcs
 > > advocates. :-)
 > 
 > Well, I did spend a while learning the theory of patches and all the
 > interesting work is what happens when two primitive patches affect the
 > same file and how they commute.

Exactly.  The point is that the vast majority of patches commute
trivially (they affect different sets of files), and a large fraction
of the rest affect widely separated hunks in the same file.  Of course
in a line of development neighboring patches are likely to be a
non-trivial commute, but once you get past that local effect you'll
run into long strings of trivial commutes.  From the point of view of
theorists and advocates, though, that's uninteresting.