[darcs-devel] [issue447] Patch Shelf feature

[Max Battcher]

Joachim Breitner wrote:
> A similar problem would be if I created some patches that I temporarily don’t
> want applied. I could branch, and then unpull them, but this is a bit too much work.

That would be the darcs-approach, and it shouldn't feel like to much 
work.  darcs get even has some very nice options to quickly do that 
branch work for you, for instance you could use --to-patch="First Patch 
you don't want yet", or you could use --tag="Last tag" and darcs pull 
any additional patches you want interactively, if you prefer that to unpull.

> In both cases a “patch shelve” would be handy. A seperate storage for patches in
> my repository that are available, but not applied. I’d imagine that the “darcs
> pull” command would then allow me to “pull and put on the shelf”, and not offer
> me this patch again. There would also be “put on shelf” and “get from shelf”
> commands. So if anyone feels like hacking on darcs, this feature would be
> appreciated.

It has been mentioned before that darcs could use a way to ignore/ban 
patches to keep pull push for re-prompting patches that you explicitly 
don't want and there's at least one existing issue for that:
http://bugs.darcs.net/issue139

The shelf idea is an interesting name, but beyond the ignore/ban patches 
part the darcs-approach would be to suggest that you just keep around a 
second "shelf" repository and then its just a simple matter of push/pull 
between your "working" repository and your "shelf" repository.  In darcs 
it's generally quite easy to keep a small web of repositories around for 
just this sort of thing.

This actually just about follows the work-flow of some groups like yours 
where you might want to keep a local repository for each co-developer of 
yours that is just entirely synced with their repository and a 
repository of your own "publishable" patches with one or more working 
repositories pulling from the co-developer repositories and pushing to 
the published repository.

-- 
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/