[darcs-users] Programmatic invocation

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 01:31:13PM +0100, Radosaw Grzanka wrote:
> > The key is that the a user-friendly input to darcs is almost trivially
> > machine-friendly (as long as it comes through stdin).  Machine-friendly
> > input is a subset of human-friendly input.
> 
> Assuming of course that nobody changes letter shortcuts on darcs
> questions to make it more userfriendly. This would ofcourse break
> existing applications.

Changing letter shortcuts is very human-unfriendly.  We aren't as flexible
as computers when it comes to supporting different interfaces.  There are a
few rarely-used keys that we might change (like the recently introduced 'c'
for "count the changes"), but it's highly unlikely we'll change any of the
main commands.  And in the process of extending the interface so that it
can be used effectively by machines we'd formalize which commands should be
kept fixed.

On the other hand, there already exists a '?' command that describes what
each letter does.  If we had a machine-friendly mode, this would presumably
output the codes in an easily parseable format.  So there's no reason that
we couldn't change 
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net