[darcs-users] short options and long names (VOTE!)

David Roundy droundy at abridgegame.org
Wed Jun 9 12:06:50 UTC 2004


On the basis of your votes, I've made some preliminary changes, which were
things that made immediate sense to me and noone disagreed with.  If you
have any other thoughts or suggestions or disagreements, now is the time to
make them known.

   -q  --quiet          suppress informational output
   -l  --look-for-adds  Add any new files or directories in the working dir


   --author=EMAIL       specify author id
   --from=EMAIL         specify email address (this is only in send)


   -u  --unified        pass -u option to diff

   --cc=EMAIL           specify email address to cc
   --to=EMAIL           specify destination email

   --sign               sign the patch with your gpg key
   -s  --summary        summarize changes

   --verify=PUBRING     verify that the patch was signed by a key in PUBRING

The most common issue has been the --patch-name vs --match confusion, with
-m corresponding to --patch-name.  To clarify the history, --match is very
recent, and the -m option did (as someone suggested) originate from the
fact that darcs record is like cvs commit, and in such a situation -m is
the same option in each case.

In every other command than tag and record, --patch-name indicates a
regular expression to be matched against the patch name.  In such cases,
--patch-name 'FOO' is equivalent to --match 'name "FOO"', which is
significantly less convenient.  The difference being that --match allows
complicated pattern matching, such as --match 'name merger && not name
pending'.  How this pattern matching is used of course depends on the
command... probably I should make the --help text for each command reflect
how the match will be used...

Adding a short command for --match seems a bit futile, since you have to
type 'name foo' anyways.  But now that --match *does* exist, the -m version
of --patch-name seems extra confusing.  Perhaps I should only allow -m for
tag and record, and perhaps even create separate flags for specifying a
new patch name (tag and record) and matching an existing patch name
(everything else).
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org




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