[darcs-users] Re: yet another feature request for darcs diff

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Jun 04, 2003 at 05:54:45PM +0300, Aggelos Economopoulos wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> first of all, thanks for implementing 'darcs diff'. Have you considered
> the possibility of prepending a header to the generated patch explaining
> what changes it is supposed to make (listing the patch names?), who wrote
> them and their comments (something resembling a changelog?). In other
> words, a natural-language resembling presentation of the information
> contained in the darcs-patch headers.

I've implemented this to a certain extent.  Currently it just lists the
patch names prepended with " *".  I'll be interested in extending this to
give the rest of the information (except perhaps the date), possibly in a
configurable manner, but I haven't decided how to do so.    There are a
couple of issues.  One is that of formatting--how to format this
information in a nice changelog-like manner.  Among other things, I'd like
to recognize tags and format them in a friendly way so it looks like a real
changelog.  Something like:

  * Feature added since 0.9.11.
darcs 0.9.11:
  * Add nice changelog feature.
  * Add other good feature.

I imagine the desired format would vary from project to project, so it
should be somewhat configurable.  There should also be a way to indicate
that certain patches should be ignored.  For example one might not want to
bother mentioning the "TODO update" patches I send in from time to time
since they aren't actual feature changes.  Or a "oops forgot to darcs add
sucha and such" might not be considered interesting for a changelog.
The obvious choices are either ignoring patches with a prefix (e.g. "#TODO
update") or only including those with a prefix ("*Cool new feature").  I
imagine we'd want to make both choices available.  Another possibility
would be to only mention patches with a comment.

In case this is seeming a bit extreme for a header to the darcs diff
output, I also want to make it possible to automatically generate
changelogs from the darcs metadata.  Any suggestions or votes will be taken
into account.  I haven't yet decided how to actually implement the
changelog.  If I'm clever enough, it may be possible (although not
necesarily desirable) to allow for the darcs comment data to be taken *out*
of a changelog file...
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org