On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 03:53:01AM +1000, Alex Lance wrote:
> IMO developing the functionality of making unpull/obliterate phone home
> to the parent repo is a poor solution to the problem. What is the actual
> problem that has led to the proposal of this solution?

The original Upull command was intended to be used to undo a
resent Pull. Back then it was not common practice to widely
remove changes from a revision control system's repository. The
merits of the Unpull command is that both its name and action
mimics this work flow very well. But there were some problems
with the Unpull command, which is why Obliterate was invented.
Users who wanted to "just remove" a patch (a slightly but in
this case very significantly different work flow) never
considered to use the Unpull command because of its name. And
users who did use Unpull in its intended way expected it to take
as argument a repo to unpull from, and got generally confused
and uncertain when it did not take such an argument.



> 2) Change the behaviour of the "obliterate" command so that:
> 
>   a) Instead of un-applying and then deleting a patch, it un-applies a
>      patch and then moves the patch bundle into a "trash" directory within the
>      repo.

Darcs already has a very powerful mechanism for this; branches.
I will not say that it is the best solution for everything, but
it has a certain simplicity and elegance to it. One feature
often wished for was a way to ignore to pull some patches that
darcs would ask for again and again. There was a suggestions to
use a special key response in the interactive Pull dialogue to
mark the patches and place them in an internal list or directory
inside the darcs repo, but the current solution is the
--complement option to Pull.

The way to safely remove patches in darcs has always been to do
it in a separate branch. But when mixing patches from different
branches it can sometimes be annoying to keep track of which
patch comes from which repository. The extra argument to Unpull
would solve this problem nicely. If it is combined with the
--intersection, --union, and --complement options it will become
quite powerful.

> Of course it's not like I'm volunteering to take on this work, so I'm

Nonetheless it is useful to know how you, and others, think
about darcs. Every person have their own model in their mind
when they use darcs, so reports like this is our only chance to
spot common misconceptions due to bad command names, misleading
error messages, and so on.


-- 
Tommy Pettersson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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