[darcs-users] quadratic _user_ time when recording!

[Isaac Dupree]

This is strictly(?) a user-interface bug:

I have lots of unrecorded changes (say, n hunks).  I want to record them 
into logical patches (say, m patches... m is likely proportional to n). 
  Darcs can only record one patch at once, so I have to go through the 
decreasing list of hunks each time... O(n*m) of my human time!

workarounds:

if there are changes that I know are in one file (which I can find out 
in the first run through the patches), I can do `darcs record 
[filename(s)]` to weed those patches out.  But in my case, most of the 
patches touch lots of files, not all different ones from each other.

Note that I want to sort the several (about 300, in my case) hunks into 
several groups (patches), but I don't know quite what patch-divisions I 
want right at the beginning because I don't remember everything I've 
done.  (And I don't necessarily want to record every change, if some are 
unfinished.)

So it's a little bit of a complicated user-interface design problem, but 
very important (to me at least - this has happened to me before too, 
when I do a bunch of hacking and finally end up with change-sets that 
are somewhat presentable, but I can't usefully record intermediately 
because I'm still learning exactly what I want to do at that point).  Am 
I missing something?  Is this a known/documented issue somewhere?

~Isaac