[darcs-users] removing --reply option from darcs

Ben Franksen ben.franksen at online.de
Sat Oct 13 20:11:13 UTC 2018


I am sending this to the users list to see if anyone is actually relying
this feature because I would like to remove it.

Darcs has since its early days supported a --reply option for the apply
command. I think this feature has been meant for continuous integration.
So when someone sends a patch, you can set up the email account so that
the patch is applied automatically and then darcs will send a reply
message. If you have also configured a posthook that runs a regression
test suite, you can also inform the sender if something went wrong.

Nice idea, especially back when darcs was young, but we live in modern
times with web hosting of repos and continuous integration tools that
offer this sort of functionality in a much more featureful, complete,
and reliable way. Besides that, I think the main functionality can be
emulated rather easily with a post-hook, though perhaps this requires
adding a bit more information to the script via environment variables or
some such.

I would like to get rid of this part of the Darcs code because it is
pretty obscure and non-portable and thus hard to maintain.

Please give us a hands-up if this would hurt you.

Cheers
Ben



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