On 25 Aug 2010, at 16:44, Guillaume Hoffmann wrote:
The user impression is that darcs is failing and there is some
support for
the old format, but very incomplete.
Darcs could print an informative message explaining exactly this.
It is just a matter of updating the message it is already printing
when getting from OF repositories.
The solution is not to provide a cumbersome way to convert the old
repo and a big warning that few read and even fewer understand, but to
provide a straightforward and simple way to convert the old repo that
everyone understands. And that is already there: 'darcs optimize --
upgrade'
Having operations accompanied by warnings is generally a bad idea in
user interfaces. It's much better to have an operation that is obvious
and doesn't require warnings/comments/explanations. Otherwise if the
user doesn't really understand what the warning is about, will be
afraid to perform the operation, not understanding what the
consequences may be.
Besides why do you think that providing 2 ways to convert an old repo
is necessary? It only creates confusion for the users who will not
know which is best to use. It's best to have only one way to do it
which is the simplest and least confusing one.
As I see it, get was designed to get a copy of a repo, or in other
words to make a clone of it. After that work can go on in both repos
and later they can still interact by exchanging patches with pull/
push. Assigning a new function to get (converting a repo) will only
confuse users, because they expect get to behave according to its
initial definition, but it wont in this case.
The only thing that converting with darcs get provides is leaving the
original repo untouched, but that can be obtained with a simple 'cp -a
repo repo.bak' before using darcs optimize --upgrade on it
--
Dan
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