[darcs-users] darcs patch: Resolve issue1588:make--dont-allow-conflicts filter ...

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

On Wed, 7 Oct 2009, Ben Franksen wrote:

> Sittampalam, Ganesh wrote:

>> I've been thinking about this a bit more and I agree that tacking on an
>> orthogonal --skip-conflicts to the existing situation would be wrong.
>>
>> Right now, we have the mutually exclusive set of options
>> --mark-conflicts, --allow-conflicts and --don't-allow-conflicts, and the
>> orthogonal option --external-merge, which can still affect the conflict
>> handling behaviour as I think you were complaining about previously.
>
> This is madness! Just reading this gives me a headache. Please let us not
> any further contemplate the issue while taking the existing set of options
> for granted, they are not and they should not remain. The combined
> semantics of all those separate options is already much too complicated.
> Discussing how yet another addition to this jumble is more or less
> intuitive sounds like a bad joke to me.
>
> I propose you stop at this point and consider what a really good UI would
> look like. You might consider my proposal to use an enumeration type value
> to supply with a general --conflicts=whatever-method. Maybe that is too
> simple in itself, but it is a step in the right direction instead of going
> deeper and deeper into the swamp.

Well, in the bit you snipped, I did say that we should do something 
different :-) The enumeration type proposal is one implementation of the 
first thing I said, namely making a set of mutually exclusive options.

We do need to be quite careful about renaming existing options without a 
very good reason, though. It might well be that the only way to achieve a 
consistent result is to do so (and perhaps provide backwards compatibility 
aliases), but we should tread carefully.

Cheers,

Ganesh