[darcs-devel] Scriptability, GUI
Daniel Lutz
DLutz at gmx.net
Mon Aug 29 09:56:04 PDT 2005
Hi,
I'm new with darcs. And I'm am very impressed by the nice features and
the very clear design (which contrasts to most of the other free
systems). What I miss is a nice GUI which allows to
- get an overview of the repository (patches, type of patches, "size"
of changes, dependencies)
- explore diffs between files/patches
- get support for summarising changes when "darcs record" (diffs,
dependencies, templates for patch names, -> "bk citool")
I think with a good GUI darcs is at least as powerful as BitKeeper for
small und medium projects.
So, I'm planing to build a GUI for darcs (most probably with Qt/C++).
When I started to gather (my) requirements theses requirements for
darcs came out. Maybe I missed something but I didn't see a way how to
fullfill them with my current darcs in a clean, robust and scalable
way.
For good scriptability I think the following features should be
available in darcs (I guess all these things are relatively easy to
implement):
1) It must be possible to address each patch in a repository
unambiguosly in every command which accepts patches (e.g. diff,
changes, unrecord).
2) It must be possible to get the file which comes out when all patches
until some patch are applied to an empty file. This is mainly required
to allow the usage of external (graphical) diff tools.
3) Repository locking. In BitKeeper there is a (blocking) block
command. Something similar would greatly improve the robustness of the
repository when using GUIs and shell scripts.
4) Setting the explicit dependencies (darcs record) by command
arguments (instead of asking for each available patch).
5) Querying the patches from which a patch depends directly should be
possible without eximining the patches/*.gz files.
-> http://bugs.darcs.net//Ticket/Display.html?id=457
What do you think:
- Are there already (clean) solutions for this in the current darcs
which I didn't see?
- Is this the direction in the development of darcs anyway?
Regards,
Daniel
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