Hi, We have an open ticket (http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1772) to add a feature to darcs to allow for interactive selection amongst the list of repos stored in _darcs/prefs/repos, which constitutes a list of those repos that the current repo has previously interacted with.
This interactive selection would probably be triggered by a flag such as --ask-repos. In principle (which is not always well adhered to), feature additions are subject to review to ensure that they are worth the cost in extra user interface and maintenance complexity. Eric has kindly written up http://wiki.darcs.net/Development/NewFeature to explain this process. I'm therefore running through this process as an Advocate for the feature, and I'd like a Skeptic to challenge me, and for others who care sufficiently to speak up for and against the proposal. I'm not proposing to implement it immediately, but it removes a barrier to doing so: the result of the discussion will be placed on the bug tracker so anyone who wants can just go ahead and implement it, confident that the feature is wanted. Cheers, Ganesh The questions to be asked of a new feature, together with my answers, are: "What problem does the proposed feature solve?" It's tedious to have to type in a remote repository location if it happens not to be the current default. "What are the user stories?" As a darcs user, I want an easy way to select between multiple commonly-used remote repositories. "Does this change any pre-existing workflows? Does this introduce any incompatibilities?" Shouldn't have any effect if the behaviour is triggered by a flag. "How do we preserve the conceptual integrity of Darcs? Is the UI for this feature really Darcs-ish?" Interactively asking the user what to do is certainly Darcs-ish in itself. I'm ambivalent about whether it constitutes flag proliferation. One issue is that it's not immediately obvious to me what the precise UI would be. It could - ask about each repo in turn: probably slow/annoying, but consistent with something like the amend-record UI for selecting the patch to amend - offer the repos with a letter or number associated with them. Limits you to 36 or 62 repos which should be fine, but would also be a new departure for darcs interactive prompts. "What are the possible unintended interactions with other pre-existing features?" Can't think of any. "What are the alternative approaches to solving the same problem? Why do we prefer this one?" Currently this information is made available to external tools such as tab-completion scripts via the --list-options flag to the pull, push, put and send commands. Such tab-completion scripts are clearly an alternative but are not necessarily easy to install and do not exist at all for native Windows users (i.e not using cygwin etc). "Who are the stakeholders? Who is going to benefit/be affected by this feature: end-users, repo farms like patch-tag, darcs developers?" End-users. _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
