[darcs-users] UI thoughts

[Aaron Denney]

Having used it a couple of times, I have some thoughts:

First of all, I think it would be nice to be able to attach
comments to patches.  The name sort of fits, but because it
is used as an ID, there is a tendency to keep it short.

And generally, thinking of a name seems to make the process of making
a patch harder than it should be.  "How descriptive should it be?  How
hard should I try to make it mostly distinctive from existing patch
names?"  I think I'd prefer some sort of auto-generated ID instead.

I do like the fact that an e-mail address is part of the ID.  I wish
the @ sign were not munged though (or at least that the munging were
reversible).

Not backwards-compatible changes, of course, but better to break
backward-compatibility early.

Finally, it would be nice to be able to see what the patches do before
pulling them.  Something like "This is the raw form: ...; because
you have the following recorded patches and pending list not in the
repository being pulled from, it will do the following: ...;" Their
is a cost, of course: they both require communication with the other
repository, even if you decide not to apply, and the second also
requires computation.  (If there were a description, seeing this would
be nice too.)  You can look at them after the pull and then "unrecord"
or "unpull" them, but this requires an accurate listing of the applied
patches.  Currently, any patches that are depended on by the patches you
accept when pulling are not printed out, so it is hard to track down
what changed in that pull.

What do others think about this?

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-