[darcs-devel] Re: [darcs-users] Re: Suggestion: track patch origin metadata (patch)

David Roundy droundy at abridgegame.org
Thu Oct 28 10:35:34 UTC 2004


On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 09:57:01AM +0200, Tomasz Zielonka wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 23, 2004 at 12:45:02PM -0400, David Roundy wrote:
> > Another idea is that we could add a string option to the disable flag,
> > which would be a message to be printed out.  So then defaults would
> > read:
> > 
> > unpull disable David doesn't allow unpulling because it's bad!
> 
> I'm not sure about this. Wouldn't it mean that you _have_ to supply the
> string, even if you don't want to? AFAICS, darcs doesn't support options
> with optional arguments...?

Right, darcs doesn't.  So I think you're right, although if we did
implement a "warn" option, giving *it* an argument might be all right.

> > > Also, I am not sure it should be listed in --help, because it is not
> > > particularly useful outside of _darcs/prefs/defaults.
> > 
> > Agreed.  Definitely doesn't belong in --help... although I'm not sure I
> > like the precedent of accepting flags that aren't listed in --help.  I hope
> > you appreciate my decisiveness... :)
> 
> If we predict that there will be more options like --disable that we
> don't want to show in --help, perhaps we should make commands accept
> some other --*-help option, for example --extended-help or
> divide options in basic and extended ones.
> 
> We could also create a more powerfull help engine. For example, imagine
> that every option was marked with categories, like selection, security,
> verbosity, dangerous, defaults, .... The user could list options
> belonging to a particular category. You could set in defaults which
> categories of options are of interest, or of no interest, to you. You
> could easily list commands that support a particular option.
> 
> However, maybe it could be an overkill to do it now and it may be seen
> as introducing an unnecessary complexity (however, not that big IMO).
> What do you think? It seems like a feature that should be strongly
> marked as pre-1.0 or post-1.0.
> 
> I am willing to implement this if people think it is a good idea.

A more powerful help/options engine would definitely be nice, but I think
it's definitely a post-1.0 job.  In particular, it would be nice to be able
indicate that a set of options are mutually exclusive, and which one is the
default of the set.  For --help itself, it might be nice to only indicate
the relevant options.  So if --dont-compress is in defaults, we'd only
mention --compress in --help, while if it isn't, we'd only mention
--dont-compress.  Even if we showed both, giving a context-sensitive
indicator of which is *currently* the default would be nice.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org




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