Hi Florent, I attempted to recruit Dan Pascu for Grumpy Old Man service on a regular basis.
Unfortunately, he is not available to do so at this time; however, he has graciously submitted his comments for this particular feature. More comments from me to follow. Thanks, -- Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
--- Begin Message ---On 11 Nov 2009, at 13:34, Eric Kow wrote:If you're interested, I'll start be requesting on list that you serve as Grumpy Old Man for Florent's recent patch39.Since you asked, I will not leave you empty handed, so I will give my input on patch39. Again I cannot read haskell code, so what I say is entirely based on the comments that accompanied the code.I agree with Florent that fetch and unapply are 2 commands that are easily learnt and with clear semantics. From this point of view I see no reason against them. But from the user perspective, while Florent calls them "very useful", I could not imagine a single use case for them. Maybe if I'm told one, I will have an a-ha moment and see the light. But right now I do not really understand how fetch can be useful. There is no description how one can inspect a patch that was fetched to _darcs/pacthes but it was not applied. Even right now I still have patches that are in _darcs/patches but I cannot access (patches I unrecorded/obliterated/amend-recorded). Or maybe he plans to store them in a different place. But then how is this different than having a patch cache. Right now I can pull a patch, then inspect it with darcs diff or darcs changes, then obliterate it. Next time I pull it it will take it from the cache so no extra download will be necessary. How does darcs fetch improve on this? I see a similar problem with unapply. What is the reason to preserve the patch in _darcs/patches if I do not have a way to inspect it? Also what is the reason to preserve it in _darcs/patches if it is preserved in the cache anyway? Maybe there is something obvious I'm missing, but the description I red didn't mention anything about this. Even if there is a way to inspect the patches, how do these commands improve over the existing obliterate + patch preserved in the cache.What I would really find useful however would be a darcs diff --patch "title" remote-repo, i.e. a way to see a patch that is in a remote repository. I prefer diff over whatsnew or changes --verbose, because I can get a unified or context diff that shows me the context around the change. whatsnew or changes --verbose are harder to read in the context. darcs changes already can do this with the --repo argument. So maybe if we could add the --repo argument to diff then we would get the ability to check remote patches and something like fetch/unapply may become unnecessary.P.S. keep in mind that I say all this because I do not see any obvious use for these two commands, that I cannot already do using the cache. Maybe I'm just missing the obvious.-- Dan
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