[darcs-users] new feature proposal: interactively select remote repo

Eric Kow kowey at darcs.net
Wed Apr 13 13:12:11 UTC 2011


On Tue, Apr 05, 2011 at 19:52:56 +0100, Miles Gould wrote:
> A possible alternative would be to allow the user to give nicknames to
> other repositories: "1.3_test", "steve", "production" and so on. Then
> the user could type "darcs push production" or "darcs pull steve".
> Is there already a facility for doing this?

There isn't one (yet).

> This is a less Darcsy interface than Ganesh's proposal, because it
> doesn't prompt the user as much. But I think I've made my feelings clear
> on that point already :-) It would avoid the need to add flags to
> push/pull/etc, and would require the user to type less in most cases.

I agree it's irritating when Darcs gives confirmation/warning style
prompts when it does not need to, and that these could be considered
usability bugs, so I wouldn't call prompting Darcs-y necessarily.

The positive aspect of the Darcs interactivity is the reduction in
memory work (I think) -- (A) because you don't have to remember or look
up something to do what might be a complex task (eg. cherry picking)
and (B) because of the shared/universal nature of the prompts (different
operations have the same kind of prompting).  That I think we want to
preserve.

Adding prompts for the sake of darcsyness, maybe not.  Assuming we can
work out the compatibility issues, maybe your proposal is the right one.
One implementation/variant of it would be

  darcs push --path-alias "1.3_test bob at server.blah:/random/path"\
             --path-alias "steve    bob at server.blah:/other/path"
             steve

The idea then is that the path-aliases could go in your darcs defaults
file.

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
For a faster response, try +44 (0)1273 64 2905 or
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