[darcs-users] support for old-fashioned repos (Was: Optimize darcs diff)

[Dan Pascu]

On 25 Aug 2010, at 16:44, Guillaume Hoffmann wrote:

>> The user impression is that darcs is failing and there is some  
>> support for
>> the old format, but very incomplete.
>
> Darcs could print an informative message explaining exactly this.
> It is just a matter of updating the message it is already printing
> when getting from OF repositories.

The solution is not to provide a cumbersome way to convert the old  
repo and a big warning that few read and even fewer understand, but to  
provide a straightforward and simple way to convert the old repo that  
everyone understands. And that is already there: 'darcs optimize -- 
upgrade'

Having operations accompanied by warnings is generally a bad idea in  
user interfaces. It's much better to have an operation that is obvious  
and doesn't require warnings/comments/explanations. Otherwise if the  
user doesn't really understand what the warning is about, will be  
afraid to perform the operation, not understanding what the  
consequences may be.

Besides why do you think that providing 2 ways to convert an old repo  
is necessary? It only creates confusion for the users who will not  
know which is best to use. It's best to have only one way to do it  
which is the simplest and least confusing one.

As I see it, get was designed to get a copy of a repo, or in other  
words to make a clone of it. After that work can go on in both repos  
and later they can still interact by exchanging patches with pull/ 
push. Assigning a new function to get (converting a repo) will only  
confuse users, because they expect get to behave according to its  
initial definition, but it wont in this case.

The only thing that converting with darcs get provides is leaving the  
original repo untouched, but that can be obtained with a simple 'cp -a  
repo repo.bak' before using darcs optimize --upgrade on it

--
Dan