[darcs-users] Patchworks Preview

Jonathon Mah me at JonathonMah.com
Fri Oct 14 14:46:02 UTC 2005


After taking into account the responses to my rudimentary darcs  
Spotlight importer a few weeks ago, I thought I'd try making  
something that would actually be useful.

So behold, Patchworks!

Well, you can't be holding it just yet. But here's a couple of  
screenshots of the work in progress:

1: <http://homepage.mac.com/jmah/temp/spotlight.png>
This shows generic Spotlight search results for "darcs-stable",  
grouped by person. The results contain all types of content: e-mail  
messages (one can be seen under David Roundy), patches to the darcs- 
stable repository, and other types of files (which are off screen).  
Patch-specific information can be seen when you disclose the  
information panel thingy.

(I've since changed the order of the displayed fields to make it more  
logical (i.e. put the e-mail address directly below the author), but  
didn't bother taking another screenshot yet.)

2: <http://homepage.mac.com/jmah/temp/tags.png>
This is the kind of thing that I find most exciting. This shows a  
Finder smart folder (or "saved search", whatever) containing the tags  
in darcs-stable (sorted by date). For those unfamiliar with Mac OS X  
10.4, a smart folder is conceptually a normal folder containing live- 
updated search results -- they're displayed alongside normal  
folders. So what's cool about this? Well, they're live-updating! So  
you can have a smart folder of your repo's patches, and you can see  
new patches as they come in, in real-time.


So what happens when you double-click one of these patch files? They  
open in the Patchworks application, which is currently very basic,  
and is where the most work needs to be done. But this is designed to  
be a patch viewer. At the moment it shows a few patch properties  
(name, date, author, etc.) and a text dump of the full patch. Under  
construction.


Oh, and why "Patchworks"? Well, I needed a name and that sounded  
adequate. To me, though, the name evokes the feelings of something  
more than just a patch viewer. We'll see, I guess.


Coming soon!



Jonathon Mah
me at JonathonMah.com






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