[darcs-devel] darcs robot command

[Ben Coburn]

Some thinking out loud regarding command aliasing and driving darcs  
with external code....

Instead of "tacking on" XML output to more commands, maybe it would  
be better to have a command for driving darcs with bi-directional XML  
messages.

For example, these two commands would be equivalent:
darcs changes -p test --xml-output
darcs robot changes -p test

Naturally there should be a "robot" subcommand for every main darcs  
command.

For example, 'darcs robot record' might...
1) Send a blank "patch info" structure waiting to be filled in and a  
big list of things available to record (where each thing has a record  
property set to false).
2) Parse the returned XML structure for the patch name, comment, etc.  
and record all the things that had their record property changed to  
true.

Even without a harness driving darcs there are some clever things  
that could be done by separating the phases described above...
darcs robot record | xsltproc fancy_record.xsl - | \
       darcs robot record --no-output
(What '--no-output' means here is that step 1 of the above  
description is skipped.)

In general, I think a "robot" command would be a good way to separate  
automation related things from the human readable interface.


P.S. Should I file things like this through the "bug tracker"? It's  
not exactly a feature request, just something I think people may want  
to think about.

Regards, Ben Coburn