[darcs-users] How to avoid extra "last regrets" question?

[Benjamin Franksen]

Hi Eric

Eric Kow wrote:
> I seem to remember this was under discussion, how to make the last
> regrets prompt less annoying.  I'd suggest we avoid going down the
> route of making this configurable just to please people who both find
> it annoying and are willing to configure their darcs, and instead
> focus on the problem at hand.
>
> It's one of these seeming rock-and-hard-places problems: how else do
> we offer the ability to revisit the very last choice (not to mention
> the IMHO less important review function)?

How about the following strategy:

First and foremost, skip the last regrets question if the user's selection 
amounts to a no-op. I hope this is un-controversial. Bonus points for 
restoring the nice message that Darcs used to issue in that case.

Next, decide for which commands the last regrets makes sense. For instance, 
'darcs record' can be so easily un-done (just say darcs unrecord), that IMHO 
last regrets make little sense. The last regrets should be reserved for 
operations that irreversibly destroy some information: unrecord, amend-
record, obliterate without -O (BTW, -O should be the default), etc.

A more difficult candidate is pull; this is (or can be) destructive if you 
have local unrecorded changes; I'd say push and pull should both check 
whether allow-conflicts (marked or unmarked) is on and in case it is on the 
last regrets make sense, else not.

I would also exclude the cases in which Darcs asks for extra confirmation 
anyway, such as when it says: "This will make unrevert impossible, are you 
sure?".

If we did all that together, systematically reviewing all commands under 
this aspect, then I predict that the remaining last regrets questions will 
not be considered annoying by anyone but instead as helpful. Problem solved.

More bonus points for making the result of this review and the decisions 
taken publicly visible in the form of a simple table on the wiki. Something 
like

Command	Last Regrets	Side Condition(s)
----------------------------------------------------------------
record	no		-
changes	no		-
unrecord	yes		chosen set of changes /= empty
rebase
  unsuspend	no		-
  suspend	yes		chosen set of patches /= empty

etc, maybe with an added column for a short rationale.

> I still hold that [dq] is better for last regrets than accepting [yn],
> precisely for the reason that it's easy to accidentally say yn when
> you don't mean it.  (And that UIs should be designed to forgive users
> like me who tend to tell the computer things they don't really mean
> like ?yeah yeah, ok I really do want to delete that file? oh wait, no!
> what was I saying?! Argh!?)

I fully agree with your reasoning: *if* we (and in consequence Darcs) decide 
that it makes sense to ask the last regrets question, then it should not be 
possible to accidentally answer it by hitting the [y] key once too often.

Cheers

> On 1 July 2013 13:56, Benjamin Franksen
> <benjamin.franksen at helmholtz-berlin.de> wrote:
>> This regularly happens to me lately:
>>
>> franksen at tiber: ...support/seq/branch-2-2 > darcs push
>> Mon Jul  1 14:37:59 CEST 2013  benjamin.franksen at helmholtz-berlin.de
>>   * top level Makefile: pdf and docs no longer variables, restructured
>>   extra
>> targets
>> Shall I push this patch? (1/1)  [ynW...], or ? for more options: n
>> Do you want to push these patches? [Yglqk...], or ? for more options: q
>> push cancelled.
>>
>> I find the extra question extremely annoying, especially (but not only)
>> when I selected no patches as in the above example. The above always
>> makes me stop, thinking, "What? Did I accidentally press 'y' when I meant
>> to press 'n'? I'm sure I didn't!".
>>
>> I loved how Darcs used to tell me "You don't want to push any patches,
>> and that's fine with me!" which always made me smile, whereas the new one
>> makes me moan.
>>
>> Is there a switch that gets me back to old behaviour, preferably one that
>> I can put in my ~/.darcs/defaults?
-- 
Ben Franksen
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