• PatchTheory

Everything you ever wanted to know about patch theory and conflictors:

Key resources

• Darcs Patch Theory (more or less) (pdf) - Ian Lynagh 2008-08-12

• PatchTheoryPeople - who (wants to) understand patch theory?

• #darcs-theory on irc.freenode.net

Patch theory on the wiki

• WhyYouWantPatchTheory

• PatchTheoryExample

• PatchTheoryQuestions

• PatchTheoryGlossary

Patch theory projects

Modeling patch theory (post darcs 2)

Ian and Ganesh want a minimal 'toy' implementation of the core patch theory stuff (which could eventually be plugged into darcs 3). The point is to prove things about patch theory. One it would make everybody feel a lot better, two we could then do things like simplify it whilst proving that things still work.

Conflictors work up to darcs 2

1. See David's FOSDEM 2006 slides

2. And from there, take a look at:

   • An explanation of mergers (and what conflictors were meant to be)

   • Why nested conflicts are bad

   • The darcs-conflicts (archived on MARC)

   • Permutivity - David's notes on the property of patches

   • GaneshPatchAlgebra

See also

• Understanding darcs - Wikibook attempt to explain darcs and patch theory very slowly and with lots of diagrams. Note: very incomplete.

Related Work

Ideas and formalisms for version control.

• A Principled Approach to Version Control by Andres Löh, Wouter Swierstra and Daan Leijen. A talk about the paper can be found here.

• Operational transforms/so6 (also known as Libresource Synchronizer)

• Consistency in Distributed Databases: A Group-like Algebra and its Applications Roscoe 1990

• Undo Actions in Collaborative Work, Prakash & Knister 1992

• Undoing Actions in Collaborative Work: Framework and Experience, Prakash & Knister 1994