On Nov 5, 2005, at 4:47 AM, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
Am Samstag, 5. November 2005 01:05 schrieb Jason Dagit:
[...]
So, if darcs could be a library that applications could link into
then a gui could be built that really integrated darcs (even eclipse
is an example). The other way to go with that is to embed a language
in darcs. But, I prefer the idea of making darcs embeddable so that
you can choose your language by making bindings for libdarcs in
<insert favorite language>.
I favor this approach. One thing I really like about Subversion is
that it
separates the command-line user interface from the part that does
the "actual
work" by making the latter a library. This way, you can implement
GUIs for
Subversion in a clean way. On the other hand, if a GUI has to
access a
command-line tool instead of a library, this is bad design IMO
because the
command-line interface is already a user interface and therefore
one user
interface (graphical) builds upon another one (command-line).
I've thought for a while that darcs should just become the canonical
implementation of libdarcs. For one thing, this could make David's
job easier. He would be able to focus on the algorithms and the
performance in Haskell. If other people were good UI builders but
didn't want to learn haskell maybe an FFI could be used. This also
assumes that there are good ways to turn a haskell library into
something with C bindings. I pick C because it seems that if you
have C bindings then just about any language will have _some_ way of
using it.
[...]
So....my proposal is for darcs to be an api which includes a way to
perform sql queries on the darcs repo database. Any takers?
Why SQL?
Hmm...I think I confused people on this point. I was thinking,
include an _optional_ sql interface mechanism. I was hoping it would
help provide a way to gather information about the repository and its
history. So, for example maybe you could do a query like "select *
from changes where user = 'dagit'" to find out every change I had
made. I don't feel strongly about providing an sql interface, it
just seems like a query mechanism is needed, and sql is well
studied. I also wasn't thinking that users would directly query in
sql unless they really, really wanted to.
I wish I had time to work on darcs. I think it's great and has so
many ways it could grow and be even better. A coworker was using
darcs this last week and commented we need a darcs blame command.
The command would work the same as svn blame. I told him about darcs
annotate, but he was not impressed. For me, it's the performance
that makes me use other tools in some cases. Large repositories and
patches are just not an option yet with darcs.
Well, just my $0.02.
Thanks,
Jason
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