[darcs-users] darcs UI: send = bundle file; send --mail = mail

Eric Kow eric.kow at gmail.com
Fri Aug 24 06:40:34 UTC 2012


Sorry if I got carried away.  I definitely appreciate feedback (rants in particular), as potential signals we may be walking down the wrong path.

> I would much rather have Darcs not send email by default (yes, I argued 
> against it, but I begin to regret it), than start with this sort of creeping 
> featurism. My experience is that Q/A style configuration seldom works well 
> in practice, if only because the sort of question you want to ask cannot be 
> answered easily out of hand. One needs to look up terms, read manuals, look 
> at the existing configurations of other tools etc etc. One needs time to do 
> such things in peace, being hurried along by a tool that asks heavy 
> questions only leads to hasty and therefore erroneous answers. Then you have 
> a botched configuration and how is the user to know how to reset it to 
> defaults or how to correct false answers?

That's an interesting observation on the potential shortcomings of a configuration system.

> Furthermore, all this functionality tends to complicate Darcs *without* 
> making it a better version control system. And don't forget that Darcs is a 
> developer tool, not something targeted at computer novices. Anyone who uses 
> Darcs will *at least* have enough experience editing text files, so if you 
> give a hint to edit the personal preferences file this is completely 
> adequate.


In my defence, this particular interaction (darcs setup send) was not meant to provide auto-configuration (just wasn't thinking along those lines). The main thing I was playing with was the idea that maybe before getting people to edit the config, we should give them a means to develop the confidence that a configuration would work, that darcs actually knows how to send mail as a result of it.

In fact, the result of the darcs setup send interaction was as I mentioned, the instructions to “put ALL sendmail-command /opt/local/bin/sendmail in your $HOME/.darcs/defaults”

On the other hand, having proposed an interactive setup dialogue, and suggesting it might generalise to other areas of darcs; it's possible that somebody will eventually argue “well, why not just edit the config files ourselves”.

So basically, I was thinking very locally, and looking very far in my generalisation.

> I hope you don't take this rant amiss, I am very fond of Darcs, and I do 
> want it to become more user-friendly, but Q/A style auto-configuration is 
> decidedly the wrong way to go IMO.


Not at all! Much appreciated.

My attitude with UI feedback is to avoid effectively asking our users to design the UI for us.  It's not about “do you like it better if we do X or Y?”  On the other, sounding things out with people can be a great source of information, (here for example, we can make use of your experience with auto-configuration gone wrong) and also just great for having different perspectives on a problem.  It's a great “whoah, not so fast”

So thanks for the extra perspective!

-- 
Eric Kow <http://erickow.com>



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