[darcs-users] skeptical review requested: darcs tag --ask-deps

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

Hi,

I'm thinking of adding a new flag to 'darcs tag', and I'm looking for a 
"skeptical review" (http://darcs.net/Development/NewFeature).

So - anyone want to play the skeptic?

The basic idea is that it should be possible to make a tag that doesn't 
include all the patches currently in a repository. You can do that by 
pulling the relevant ones into a fresh repository, but that's not very 
user-friendly.

My proposal is to add a flag --ask-deps to 'darcs tag', similar to the 
existing flag for 'darcs record', that asks the user about which 
explicit dependencies to include in the tag.

I've written a preview implementation at

http://hub.darcs.net/ganesh/darcs-tag-ask-deps

The subtle difference between tag and record is that a normal patch by 
default has no explicit dependencies, but a tag by default has 
everything as an explicit dependency.

This leads to a slight UI anomaly: when selecting the dependencies for a 
tag, the 'd' key for saying "no" to all remaining patches is disabled. 
This is because it's unlikely to be what the user actually wants, and in 
the current implementation it would run very slowly. The user is 
expected to press 'a' instead once she has finished saying 'n' to 
patches that should be omitted from the tag.

The alternative I considered was some kind of inverted approach where 
the user selects patches to omit from the tag, but that seemed more 
confusing to me and would likely have implied disabling the 'a' key 
instead of the 'd' key.

The immediate driver for this was a conversation with some users that 
want a way to mark certain patches in their repo as belonging to a 
particular feature. I felt that tags would be a good solution for this, 
with the addition of this feature.

Cheers,

Ganesh