[darcs-devel] user experience engineering note

David Roundy daveroundy at gmail.com
Tue Jan 15 20:07:14 UTC 2008


On Jan 15, 2008 3:59 AM, Eric Kow <eric.kow at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We do not further document what "debug" does, and it has a confusingly
> > similar name to me.
> >
> > I would argue that "darcs -vv" or greater should automatically invoke
> > "--debug".
>
> I had submitted a set of patches, some of which set up the -v -v
> infrastructure, and others which use it to display more information.
> One of the patches needed some work -- potential memory leak -- which
> I never got to.  So I suspect that only the infrastructure patches
> made it in and not the actual verbosity.  On the other hand, I notice
> that David has added some extra verbosity.  He has also simplified the
> -v -v approach to a single --debug flag, as Mark points out... which
> probably makes sense from a keep-it-simple perspective.

To clarify, I didn't like the idea of counting the number of instances
of a flag.  And getting "debug" information is distinct (in my mind)
from what we developers consider useful output.  e.g. when you run
darcs changes -v, you don't mean that you want additional information
about what is going on, you mean you want to see the content of the
patches.  If something is going wrong (e.g. changes is hanging when
viewing the changes in a remote repository), you might want to run
darcs changes --summary --debug, which (to me) argues that --debug is
not the extreme opposite of summary.

Anyhow, the point of --debug is to be catchall for any information we
thing could be useful in seeing what darcs is doing.  For some darcs
commands, --verbose is currently used for this (giving output such as
"applying patches to the pristine cache"), but I don't like this
approach.

Making darcs notice when it's taking a while and dynamically increase
the progress output sounds like the optimal approach for "normal"
cases (with --quiet to disable this behavior).  --debug is good if you
know something's going wrong, and this is your second attempt.

David


More information about the darcs-devel mailing list