[darcs-users] darcs patch: Add Patch-salt as ignored prefix

[Reinier Lamers]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 02:08:41PM -0400, David Roundy wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 10:53:34AM -0600, zooko wrote:
> > following-up to my own note:
> >
> > On Oct 8, 2008, at 10:42 AM, zooko wrote:
> >
> >> See what I mean?  That's the key concept of "out-of-band
> >> signalling".  Make it so that the metadata which darcs adds and which
> >> darcs parses and hides and uses is completely separate from the patch
> >> comment that the user edits, and make it so the two cannot be
> >> confused with one another.
> >
> > Basically, what I would *really* like is if darcs had a way to put  
> > arbitrary key-value pairs into the patch description such that old  
> > versions of darcs would ignore key-value pairs whose keys they didn't  
> > recognize.
> 
> But why? That's what you haven't explained.  Why not just hide some
> data that we don't use and allow users to hide some data if they would
> like to?

Because it makes things more complicated, I'd say. Now you have: "Type
something, that will be the patch comment". That becomes: "Type
something, that will be the patch comment. Unless you have lines
starting with 'Ignore-this:', they'll be used for distinguishing patches
but not displayed in the changes list". But how darcs distinguishes
patches is darcs' business, not something a user should have to care
about.

It will also be a rather obscure feature, so users might type
'Ignore-this:' in their patches not knowing that that will cause that
line to be hidden.

Reinier