[darcs-users] Repository preferences (Was: Re: 2.3 release schedule)

[Max Battcher]

On 5/26/2009 19:57, Petr Rockai wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Simon Michael<simon at joyful.com>  writes:
>> Petr Rockai wrote:
>>> - .authorspellings (Simon) -- I find this to be controversial though
>> Oh dear.. what would fix that ?
>
> Well, it's a new incompatible way to dealing with repository settings. I am not
> opposed to a simpler system of preferences, in fact, I'd happily abolish
> setpref, since it sort of sucks anyway, but we should put up a plan or
> something, since now we risk having three incompatible preference systems in
> darcs, which is two too many (we had two before, which was merely one too
> many).
>
> I don't intend to put the burden on you personally, I'd just like to have some
> semi-clear consensus on where to go from here before committing to this new
> preference handling approach.

IIRC, the general consensus the last time this was discussed was to bend 
.authorspellings to use the existing methodologies (ie, something like 
darcs setpref authorspellingsfile and _darcs/prefs/authorspellings), but 
was a) lacking better terminology, and b) was out of reach for the 
original author's knowledge of darcs.

There was a noticeable contingent in favor of using the argument as an 
excuse to entirely revise the _darcs/prefs and darcs setpref approach. 
However, pragmatically such a thing should be done at a major backwards 
compatibility break, so is out of the question for Darcs 2.3, but might 
be something to explicitly add to the issue tracker for Darcs 3. 
(Bearing in mind that Camp itself already has a somewhat different 
approach to prefs files, for better or worse, and some of those choices 
may effect Darcs 3 anyway, should Camp indeed prefigure Darcs 3.)

A quick search didn't turn up the original discussion (I did, however, 
notice Issue 1392: use Parsec for authorspellings) so it is certainly 
possible I'm misremembering.

As for problem (A): I'm certainly in favor in the idea that 'aka' might 
be a better, less verbose, name. I realize that it won't be immediately 
obvious what a _darcs/prefs/aka is for from name alone, but I think that 
knowing it is aliases/nicknames makes it quick to grok it is a "also 
known as" file. Certainly darcs setpref akafile is much nicer than darcs 
setpref authorspellingsfile.

--
--Max Battcher--
http://worldmaker.net