On 11 Apr 2009, at 00:16, Eric Kow wrote:
Hmm, perhaps a concrete example might make this clearer.
Hi Eric
I was thinking something along the lines of, when you do a darcs push
that fails because the target repo is unavailable (like I say, for me
this is usually because I deleted it), darcs could present a list of
known repos from _darcs/prefs/repos and present them interactively, eg:
% darcs push
Repository "../repo-gone" does not exist, choose another:
[../repo-last-used]
[email protected]:repo
etc etc...
On reflection, it doesn't seem as useful as I initially thought.
You might find me saying "err, no, thanks" to a lot of UI proposals
floating on this list :-) I don't mean to shoot them down or to
needlessly trot out the iron fist. The game is balance what users
might
find friendly in one particular local case with an overall global
problem of keeping things as tight and tidy as possible. Just one
tiny
pebble here and there added to the UI and the whole thing turns into a
sort of avalanche of UI "features".
Don't feel a need to apologise for rejecting my suggestions. Never
did I say I thought they were any good =) However, I find I build
better software by discussing numerous ideas with people, rather than
trying to deduce the "ideal" solution from first principles each
time. I respect your desire to keep the conceptual integrity[1] of
darcs intact. (The user interface, is in fact, one of the best
features of darcs, so I would hate to see it ruined.)
That said, keep the proposals coming! Sometimes a more general
solution
that just hits the spot will emerge from the discussions. I think the
nice thing about the darcs UI is that a lot of different operations
work the "same" way. So the kind of proposals I (personally) tend to
like are those which have a sort of broad applicability to lots of
different commands/cases. Anyway, we may make mistakes in what we
deem
tight and tidy, but we certainly mean well!
Ok, how about two other possible refinements of the idea:
% darcs <push|pull|put> --choose-repo
% darcs list-know-repos
The first I imagine offering the same interactive list as above, but
now it's not intrusive, and applies to three commands, not one.
The second I imagine printing the contents of _darcs/prefs/repos to
the screen. Like `cat _darcs/prefs/repos` in fact. Hell *I* could
write that, I read the IO chapter of RWH last night =)
WDYT, is there more promise in either of these?
Cheers
Ashley
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#Conceptual_Integrity
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