> On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 21:39:08 -0500, Norman Ramsey wrote:
> > Absolutely not. Why should I interrupt a nice sensible command-line
> > workflow to edit a boring file? You're talking not only about
> > expanding a 1-second task to *at* *least* 10 seconds or more just to
> > fire up the editor and fool around, but you're also imposing on me the
> > additional cognitive burden of translating a file name to a regular
> > expression matching that file name and *only* that file name (God help
> > me should I forget to escape a dot). I understand the power of regexps
> > for detecting boringness, but there's a reason the shell uses globbing
> > patterns and not regexps. For the human interface, regexps are a tool
> > of the devil.
>
> I understand the workflow argument, thanks for that! We tend to resist
> adding new commands and switches to darcs itself (which is not to say
> that we never do it, just that we try to see how reasonable it is to try
> and get away without it whenever possible).
I understand wanting to avoid feature creep.
> So if we could work out a reasonable way for you to turn this into a
> third party script, would that be good enough? I realise this imposes
> an overhead of its own -- having to remember an assortment of darcs
> scripts instead of having everything nicely under the darcs umbrella.
I can always call my script 'darcs', have it do what it understands
and then delegate the rest to the next darcs on my $PATH. I do this
sort of thing all the time---don't like to clutter my namespace :-)
What I would consider reasonable is that there be a
darcs getpref
to balance darcs setpref. It's a fundamental principle of design that
when you offer an interface that mutates state, you should also offer
a way to observe that state.
This still leaves me with the problem of finding a regular expression
that maps exactly to a given string. This is only a problem because
there are so many different flavors of regexps---I think even the
posix standard blesses three different kinds of regexps. (More
devil's work.) I would be willing to deal with the regexp quoting on
my own, but I cannot find in the darcs manual which flavor of regexp
is used in the boringfile. (It says elsewhere that egrep regular
expressions are used for some other commands. Is that also the case
in the boringfile? The manual should say...)
> > I can't write a reliable script because darcs has no 'getpref' so I
> > can't easily discover the identity of the boringfile my script should
> > be editing.
>
> Does darcs show repo | grep boringfile help?
Not hardly:
: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 699 ; darcs show repo
Type: darcs
Format: darcs-1.0
Root: /home/nr/cs/40/www/solutions/um
Pristine: PlainPristine "_darcs/pristine"
Cache: thisrepo:/home/nr/cs/40/www/solutions/um
Num Patches: 88
: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 700 ; darcs -v
2.0.2 (release)
Norman
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