It *is* the typical case for me. I very rarely pull from a repo in order to
see what's there. Usually I'm pulling from a repo that I already know what's
there, either because it is another repo of mine, because I was just looking
at it over the shoulder of my co-worker, or because I just did a
"pull -v\nwwwwwwww" to see what was there.
That last bit looks to me as if it directly contradicts the second
sentence of the paragraph.
To be clear, for me there are two very common uses of pull and one uncommon use.
The two common ones are: 1. pull all (and usually examine each patch as it goes
past), and 2. cherry-pick a patch or a small set of patches that I already know
is there (possibly changing my mind if it turns out that the patches I want
depend on some patches that I don't want). The uncommon case is 3. pulling when
I don't know what is there and cherry-pick a patch upon seeing it and deciding
I want it. I've done case #3 only a couple of times (when updating my darcs
from the official darcs darcs repo).
Hm, seems I'm the one with the unusual pattern of usage then ;-) In my
experience, repos contain more stuff written by other people than me
most of the time (unless I have the luck to get into a one- or
two-person project). It is a frequent task to browse through the list of
things that have been added to the repo since the last time I looked at
it. Only then I would decide whether to pull them all or just part of
them (or none of them, sometimes).
In my view, it is the job of the UI to present all information I need
and then let me select. It should do both things, not just the latter.
(You would not switch to the command line and do "pull -v\nwwwwwwww" and
then switch back to the UI and select patches, wouldn't you ;-)
There is no point of course in fighting over preferences. Once we have
the information (i.e. the dependency graph, patch names etc.) we can
present them in the UI in different manners and let users choose what
they like most. It is not too difficult to display the graph as tree, or
in the structure Jamie has suggested, or in a flat list. We can make
that selectable from the preference page. We can also have a checkbox
there for switching on and off the autoselection.
I think the more significant problem is how we can get to the
information in the first place. Running the executable too often will
make the UI slow. Also, we would risk that the repository changes
between runs of the executable (as David Roundy has pointed out to me).
So it would be better to run the executable during the entire selection
process.
Ciao,
Leif
Regards,
Zooko
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