[darcs-users] How do disable "do you want to push these patches"?

[Ben Franksen]

Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> On 07/03/2016 22:57, Evan Laforge wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 12:56 PM, Ganesh Sittampalam <ganesh at earth.li>
>> wrote:
>> Actually I've always thought that rather than edit hunks, I'd prefer a
>> feature to quit the record but save the answers until now.  Then I can
>> edit it in vim normally, not in the confusing diff display, and
>> rerecord with a replay up to that point.  With a bit of editor
>> integration, I could replace the hunk display with telling the editor
>> to jump there.  Then I get full context and I can edit as I see fit,
>> and hit a button to restart and replay the record if I made a change.
>> This would also solve the problem where you make a change in the hunk
>> editor but now you can't test it or go out of the hunk bounds and then
>> when you record you've got to either make the same change in the file
>> or revert to the new version, and then your editor hassles you about
>> how the file changed and offers to destroy any unsaved local changes,
>> etc.
>> 
>> But that's nontrivial and I'm sure is in "patches welcome" territory.
> 
> Interesting idea - one difficulty I see is how you save the answers. If
> you do it positionally, then any subsequent edits to the source tree
> would make them invalid. Doing it textually would make the whole thing
> pretty big.

I think a good approach here would be to mimic git's staging area. Some 
persistent place in the repo where e.g. an interrupted record stores the 
already decided changes. Perhaps a switch --continue or even an interactive 
solution ("resume last interrupted record? [yn]"). It should be possible to 
say "s" ("store selection") when the last regrets question is asked.

> More sophisticated interactive selection is definitely interesting in
> general. One thing I'd like to see is a graphical interface (e.g.
> integrated with darcsden). A nicely done interface could make it easy to
> record multiple patches and revert some hunks simultaneously, which is
> often something I find myself wanting when doing a big record.

Not sure if a GUI is the way to go (other than for darcsden I mean). IMO 
interactive patch selection in darcs could be vastly improved by adding a 
pair of "undo/redo" command keys. (The existing "k" can exhibit rather 
surprising behavior, which is why I almost never use it.)

Another point on my wish list in particular for hunk selection is a command 
key to display the hunk under consideration with context, like in diff -u. 
The normal darcs way to display changes is a good default but sometimes 
there are many similar or identical lines or hunks in the file; this is when 
context could be extremely helpful. Bonus points for making the number of 
context lines configurable, ideally also during the interactive selection 
(perhaps using +/- keys to increase/decrease context size).

> FWIW when I searched briefly I came across this post where Ben Franksen
> expresses fairly similar opinions/ideas to yours:
> http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2013-July/026900.html

Thanks for mentioning it, I had forgotten half of it.

Cheers
Ben
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