On Dec 28, 2008, at 04:13, Trent W. Buck wrote: > Ben Coburn <[email protected]> writes: > >> While exercising some code, I noticed that darcs 2.1.2 no longer >> reorders patches when 'optimize --reorder-patches' is called on a >> repository in the 'hashed, darcs-2' format. Does this mean that the >> new format is efficient enough to make --reorder-patches irrelevant? >> If so, that's a good thing! >> >> p.s. Maybe commands should start grouping options into 'Options:', >> 'Advanced Options:', and some group for options that only apply to >> the >> old repository format. It would be nice to have options that no >> longer >> apply to the current format marked somehow in the help/manual. > > In general, the "legacy" options should already either be no-ops or > issue a "I'm an alias for <new option>!" when used in a darcs-2 repo. >
I think darcs should also emit a notice as soon as it detects that an option is not relevant to the current situation. Something like 'Darcs is ignoring option --foo because it does not apply to baz.'. This way, it is clear to the user that darcs is doing the right thing. > I'm working on improving the long help (below the options in "darcs > foo > --help") to also mention this, but I'm not sure how useful it would be > to also put those options in a separate section. How many obsolete > options exist? > > Actually, I guess I feel that it should be possible to tell what the > "common" options are by looking at the ones that have a short option > (-f > as well as --foo). How would people feel about a single option list > per > command, and sorting it? > I think that most of us only use 3-4 options regularly for any given command, through this varies per-person. Darcs is simple and easy to use, however the options lists can be overwhelming to a new user. I think we should continue to divide the lists of options into "common" and "less commonly" used options. The trouble with relying on short names is that not all "common" options have short names (--dry-run, etc...). I don't think the list should be sorted alphabetically. It is more important to group options that are *semantically* related together. For example, --union, --intersection, --compliment, should all be listed next to each other! > For example, "darcs pull --help" would have the following. I already > have an (ugly) patch to sort the options. Perhaps we should also > simplify things by compressing the --foo and --no-foo or --dont-foo > options, e.g. "--[no-]foo". Incidentally, why do we have both --no > and > --dont prefixes?! > Yes, I think we should compress negated options to --[no-]foo and -- [dont-]foo. Hopefully, this will make the options list visually easier to read. The descriptions should probably be all for the positive version of these options. Regards, Ben Coburn _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
