[darcs-users] darcs send giving unhelpful errors.

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2004 at 10:43:49PM -0700, Samuel A. Falvo II wrote:
> Just for the sake of trying it, I decided to try and send myself some 
> patches on a program I'm writing.  Here's the transcript of what's 
> happening:
> 
> bash-2.05b$ ls
> Framework.mak  _darcs     docs    framebuffer  libs    m_config     util
> Makefile       cut.h      events  gadgets      lists   m_sendEmail
> Rules.mak      depend.sh  fonts   images       m_boot  main
> bash-2.05b$ darcs send -a --interactive -o zzz
> Bad argument: `'
> Usage: darcs send options ...
> Send patches to another repo via email.
>   ...(options which you already know about)...
> bash-2.05b$ 
> 
> I'm not at all sure what the argument that it is referring to.
> 
> Why is this happening?

That *is* a bad error message!!! (and a sort of funny one...)  I've
improved this error message a bit.  As a side-effect, the usage messages on
all commands are being improved. :)

The problem is that send requires an argument, which is the repository to
which you wish to send a patch.  This is needed in order to be sure to
provide enough context so that the receiver can apply the patch.

For experimenting, you could

mkdir /tmp/foo
cd /tmp/foo
darcs inittree
cd -
darcs send -o zzz /tmp/foo

Also, --all and --interactive are opposites, so specifying both of them
isn't such a good idea.  In that case, the behavior is not guaranteed (in
practice one of them will always override the other one, but I don't
promise never to change which one dominates).  But this isn't related to
the error message.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org