[darcs-users] Revisiting "whatsnew -l implies --summary"

[Steven E. Harris]

Back in February and March 2005 there was some discussion proposing
making the --look-for-adds or -l argument to "whatsnew" also enable
the --summary or -s argument, meaning that asking for potential
additions automatically presented in summary format.¹

The arguments seemed based on the rhetorical question, "Why would you
ever want to see the detailed hunks /and/ the potential additions?" Of
course, that argument won the day.²

Today, as part of improving the darcsum.el (X)Emacs mode³, I found
such a scenario. In darcsum.el, the main entry point is the function
`darcsum-whatsnew', which accepts an optional argument to enable
--look-for-adds. darcsum's main job is to parse and organize pending
changes, so it passes the --no-summary argument in all cases to keep
the hunks visible.

I noticed that darcs ignores --no-summary in concert with
--look-for-adds. It's one think to make --summary the default, but
taking things too far to ignore deliberately overriding the
default. When darcsum.el tries to query for changes and additions, it
sees nothing relevant, for it's expecting to see a leading "{" on the
first line denoting a patch.

I considered trying to hack around this problem, running "whatsnew"
once with --look-for-adds to collect the additions, then running
"whatsnew" again to collect the patches, but that just seems
wrong. Shouldn't "whatsnew" respect --no-summary?


Footnotes: 
¹ http://www.abridgegame.org/pipermail/darcs-devel/2005-February/001309.html
² http://www.abridgegame.org/pipermail/darcs-devel/2005-March/001358.html
³ I'm likely to be taking over as maintainer of this mode.

-- 
Steven E. Harris