Hi!

Andreas Raab wrote:
> Hi Göran -
> 
> It'd be easier to give feedback if you had something to try out ;-) 

I know, it is a bit unfair of me to "push" it given that it is not yet 
usable. I just want to perhaps find someone to help :). So forgive me 
for the "DS spam".

> Abstractly speaking this sounds all cool but we'll only know when we 
> actually try it.

Yup.

> One thing that's not quite clear in this picture is 
> where the "canonical" source for patches would be and how it would be 

Not sure I understand what you mean here.

> produced. In most of what you wrote you've concentrated more on the 
> harvesting aspect (i.e., being able to cherry-pick contributions from 
> elsewhere) but how does an actual development flow look like?

Well, I can't really say although I have some ideas, let me again 
mention some things Deltas should make possible and then we could try to 
think together what that means for the "flow":

- Deltas can be loaded into an image "en masse" because loading a Delta 
simply deserializes it into a fully self contained object. This means we 
can read, edit and analyse them without affecting the image.

- Deltas can be applied and unapplied.

- Deltas can "reason" about how well they can be applied. This is 
because each change within the Delta has information about the state 
"before" the change. For example, a ModifyMethodChange has both new and 
old source (and stamps etc).

Some things we already know:

- Deltas in fact implement a more advanced changelog. It could be used 
to replace the .changes file.

- Since they can be applied/unapplied Deltas can easily be used to build 
a "Quilt"-like system.

- Deltas are "rich" in state and can be analysed/manipulated in a lot of 
different ways.

So... post is getting long. :) I am all ears for observations/ideas at 
this point. And yes, I will try to get DS into such a shape that we can 
actually start playing more seriously with them.

Fully replacing Changesets would be a great start IMHO. To do that we 
need fileformat and UI. And a few other odd bits, but not much.

regards, Göran