[darcs-users] uber-interactive UI

[Eric Kow]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 17:30:49 +0000, Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> >when I have a lot of hunks to record, into a few different
> >patches, I wish I could go through them in one darcs-record
> >session and sort them into the several different "bins" (patches I
> >want to create).

> I have this issue too. It also fits in with Florent's point about
> being able to revert stuff while simultaneously recording. I think
> it's something we should address in an orthogonal UI feature.

So my traditional response has been to resist this sort of thing
(eg. Zooko's http://bugs.darcs.net/issue107, which obliterate during
push; revert during record) on the grounds that while they would be
very useful, they would also make the UI complicated and horrible.

Ok, yada yada.  But how about a new approach?  Perhaps, instead of Fight
Feature Creep, what we really need here is to Subsume Feature Creep, try
to figure out the one feature that will make everybody stop asking for
new features.

One solution may be a sort of darcs shell that you could drop into from
interactive mode (inspired from Florent's :revert).  You see a list of
numbered patches:

 [1] hunk ./yourfile 42 -1 +3
 [2] hunk ./yourfile 109 +49
 [3] adddir ./d
 [4] move ./yourfile ./d/yourotherfile
 [5] hunk ./foo 39 +39 -32

And then you can issue commands like

 $ revert 2 3
 $ edit 1
 $ record 1 4 5
 $ list

Perhaps something like this would allow us to explore all the fancy
enhancements we'd like to see.  It's possible, though that this would
be extending far beyond the traditional remit of Darcs and this sort
of thing would be where the Darcs library comes in.

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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