[darcs-users] Preference editor [was: push --dry-run...]

[David Roundy]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 10:39:38PM +0200, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> [back to the list, I like company]
> 
> >> instead of reparent you do
> >>   rm _darcs/prefs/lastrepo
> 
> SP> having it be a simple command is definitely easier for the new
> SP> user.
> 
> There's quite a bunch of things under _darcs/prefs that should be
> easily editable, and the set is growing all the time (last time was...
> today).  I share Peter's distaste for a maze of twisty little
> commands, all different, so I think what we need is a generic
> preferences editor.
> 
> Right now, the preferences are still rather limited, so a simple
> design would be
> 
>   darcs setpref foo bar
> 
> which does the equivalent of 'echo bar > _darcs/prefs/foo' but with
> some input validation and semi-random ``are you sure'' prompting.
> However, as the set of preferences grows larger, that will likely
> become inadequate, so I think the right thing to do is to wait and see
> what exciting new things happen under _darcs/prefs.

Interestingly enough, there already exists a setpref command, which doesn't
do this...

_darcs/prefs/prefs has the prefs that could be exportable from a
repository... that is, prefs that you may want copied when you run darcs
get on a repo.  This holds for example, predist and the test command, which
you really almost always want to be the same in every copy of the repo.  So
setpref actually creates a patch indicating that the pref has been changed,
so it'll propogate via pulls, etc.

The other prefs options (defaults, lastrepo, repos, email, author) don't
really make any sense to pull from one repo to another.  These are the ones
you're talking about (you being in the plural here), and I don't really
think they deserve a darcs command for modifying them.  A little gui
preferences app would make sense, but I don't really care for the idea of
doing "darcs COMMAND" for something that won't affect the repository
itself--that is, something which can't be pulled or sent into another repo,
and whose output also isn't related to the repository contents.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org