Hi all, our patch selection mechanism is very fine, but I feel it should give a 'last exit before hell question' at the end, so that you can review your patch selection before commiting to whatever action it is you're doing. Let me explain: suppose you are sending to a repository. You have three new patches: a b c, with c depending on b. You will have the following interaction with darcs:
'do you want to send a?' -> y 'do you want to send b?' -> n 'congratulations, you've sent a alone.' -> wtf? This is especially frustrating and error-prone if b and c are big patches with subtle dependencies. One answer is to use 'w', but it is not satisfying: you are offering darcs the power to select patches for you, but you forfeit the occasion to see which patches you will effectively send/push/pull/… There again, if you're not sure about dependencies between patches, this is very error prone and confusing. That's why i propose to add a question after the last patch has been selected, as follows: do you want to <verb> these <things>? [ynvpsrm] With y: yes, go on n: no, cancel v: view p: view in a pager s: write the output of v to a file and quit r: restart the selection process m: modify the selection m is hard to implement, but as a first approximation, we could just go back to the last patch question and let the user use j/k. s would be very powerful coupled with a --read-selection-from-file flag. You could then save your selection to a file and edit it to fine-tune it. In particular, in record, this would allow you to split hunks. Commands could add more specialized answers to that question: for example, send could propose to edit the mail, or cc: someone, and so on. Of course the problem is that this would change darcs' interactive ui and break any scripts that interact with it (in particular our shell tests). We could also add a --cautious/--reckless flag pair, but i'm not too keen on adding many flags, especially when --reckless would probably not be that useful out of existing scripts (you save one 'y', if it counts for you, you're not using the interactive ui, are you?). What do you think? Change the ui, add a flag, do nothing, something else? _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
