[darcs-users] informal poll: do you script interactive darcs?

[Dave Love]

Ganesh Sittampalam <ganesh at earth.li> writes:

>> The Emacs integrations (vc-darcs, darcsum, dvc(?)) will probably be
>> affected.  This is the sort of reason I wanted vc-darcs in the darcs
>> repo :-(.
>
> Can you remind me why it's not? The obvious issues that spring to mind
> are the maintenance burden and also managing copyright assignment to FSF.

See the comment in <http://bugs.darcs.net/msg9586>.  I don't understand
why it needs an assignment for darcs, but the main reason for writing it
was the assignment.  It's maintained for the versions I use, but I
confess I can't keep up with the rate at which Emacs breaks things these
days, and it really needs some changes in Emacs (or did when I last
checked).

> From the point of view of the maintenance burden, I wouldn't be opposed
> to adding it if it could come with a set of shell tests that would make
> it easy to see when something it relied on was broken/changed.

I don't know how difficult that would be for vc-darcs off-hand.  It
probably would be more difficult for darcsum (which, unfortunately,
needs to know about essentially all of darcs' output).  I don't know how
I'd go abut writing tests for commands which produce asynchronous output
to a buffer; I suspect that's a fair amount of work.

I should have said that any change like this needs to be easy to test
for, so that things like vc-darcs can adjust as necessary to support
different versions.  If it can be done reliably by the darcs version
number, that should be OK.