[darcs-users] new feature proposal: interactively select remote repo

[Eric Kow]

This is an "Eric procrastinates" post, not to be taken too seriously.

On Tue, Apr 05, 2011 at 15:26:06 +0100, Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> 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 can't play Skeptic because I want this too.
(unless we grow desperate)

> "What are the user stories?"
> 
> As a darcs user, I want an easy way to select between multiple
> commonly-used remote repositories.

Could be interesting to flesh this out into some sort of scenario.
At the first level, a Scenario provides enough context and some
concrete cases in how your users (the Personas) would use the product,
but without going into too much technical detail.

So it's not "the user will click this widget", but "the user will look
up this information and decide X and perform Y".

Recycling my past pseudo-personas, I think basically the people who
would care about this are Jacek (repo maintainer, vcs expert) and Steve
(regular user, not too sophisticated but uses darcs enough to want it to
make life easier).

Adam (casual open source contributor) and Mike (newbie, the sort of
guy who would record -a his 3 Excel spreadsheets with message "Update
Excel spreadsheets") probably would not care.

-----
Redbus Solutions, a small 6-coder team are on their final push towards
version 1.3 of their NinjaPlait product. The NinjaPlait repositories
consist of a single mainline branch and a separate X.Y branch for each
release.  Steve has been splitting his time between the 1.3 release and
this new calendar feature he's been working on over the year. Today,
It occurred to Steve that the date parsing cleanup he did along the way
would also kill a couple of blockers on the 1.3 list.  Having already
pushed his calendar patches from his local copy to the mainline, he runs
darcs push again, turning on repository selection because he can't be
bothered working out the path to 1.3. ...
-----

Bah, I couldn't finish this because it didn't seem too
realistic for Steve to be mixing up his calendar feature work with the
1.3 cleanups.  Why would he have the 1.3 branch in his repository?

Anybody know about this Goal-Directed-Design stuff that can run with
this?

> One issue is that it's not immediately obvious to me what the precise UI
> would be. It could

I'll just mention that we have a list picking UI for multi-line
_darcs/prefs/authors

Eric

* I'm not saying people should do this, by the way; this is just like that
time I read Nudge and thought putting a frowny face into Darcs would be
a good idea.  Just roll your eyes while I play with the new idea.


-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
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