[darcs-users] UI thoughts

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 05:46:51PM -0700, Aaron Denney wrote:
> 
> 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.

Done.  There are issues if you want to use vi as your editor, but at least
with emacs it works.

> 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?"

One other thought on this issue is that one could use a simple convention
for patch names to make it easy for users to pull specifically the patches
they want.  For example, if all your bug fixes are named "bugfix" or
"bugfix: explanation...", then the user could easily pull all the bugfix
patches using a 'darcs pull --patch-name bugfix' (followed perhaps by an
'a' to get all of them).

> 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.

Done.  Also as I mentioned yesterday, I reversed the order in which patches
are presented, so now if you say no to a patch you don't get prompted for
any that it depends on.  I think this is more intuitive than it was
before.  Also added an 'a' and 's' option which pull all remaining patches
or skip all remaining patches.

Changes are in the repo.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org