[darcs-users] darcs patch: Ignore junk more conservatively. (and 1 more)

David Roundy droundy at darcs.net
Thu Oct 9 09:44:07 UTC 2008


On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 05:57:07PM -0400, Max Battcher wrote:
> David Roundy wrote:
> > 
> > > 3. * Max suggested that we call the line 'Patch-salt'
> > >    * David pointed out that 'Ignore-this' is more general
> > >    * Tommy suggested 'Ignore-this-patch-salt'
> > >    * Nathan proposed 'Hidden-metadata'
> > >
> > >    I vote for the Tommy route, which seems to meet all
> > >    criteria and also reduces the risk of ignoring too much.
> > 
> > Nor do I like these.
> > 
> > What I don't know (and maybe it's hidden somewhere in those emails
> > that I only skimmed) is what problem there is.  Why is it considered
> > important for users to be able to write "Ignore-this: foobar" in their
> > patches and have darcs display this to people who pull from them?
> 
> At least in my proposal/view/suggestion the idea was not to drop
> "Ignore-this:"...  I don't have a problem with a generic "hidden comment",
> and in fact can see a use for it.  My only suggestion was that for the patch
> salts that darcs unstable is generating it would be nice to make sure that
> in the case when you are reading a patch (in say an emailed darcs patch or a
> web application or even just darcs annotate --patch) that we know why the
> ignore-this is there...  Right now in unstable you get at the top of the
> patch (when viewed outside of darcs or with darcs annotate --patch):
> 
> Ignore-this: hexgobbledygook
> 
> That's fine, but not particularly meaningful to anyone (Why is this in the
> patch? Why is this ignored? Etc)...  So I suggested for this particular bit
> of information to add in a more specific tag (ie, "Patch-salt: ") which
> would make more sense, I think, to someone viewing a patch outside of darcs
> for the first time and wondering what the hex string means.  Tommy's
> suggestion of "Ignore-this-patch-salt: " combines the idea of leaving the
> existing ignore-this as a prefix while adding the useful presentation to
> potential viewers of the patch as I suggested.  Tommy's suggestion also has
> the benefit (like the "X-*: " suggestion) of providing a space for third
> parties to give themselves a queryable space for metadata, which may or may
> not be useful.

It isn't meaningful data...

> One final compromise that I could see of benefit would be:
> 
> Ignore-this: Auto-generated patch salt: hexgobbledygook
> 
> No new ignored prefix, just some added text to the auto-generated hidden
> comments describing the intent of the hidden comments, which is my sole
> issue here and we can debate hidden meta-data fields some other time...

Yes, this would be reasonable, albeit overly verbose.  If there's a great
desire for this extra verbosity, we could add it (even optionally).  Since
darcs never uses this gobbledygook, it doesn't matter what it says.  I'd
rather have it shorter so it only wastes one line of my email.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net


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