On Fri, Aug 06, 2010 at 14:27:14 +0000, Petr Ročkai wrote: > I have pushed first two (cleanup) patches. I am not opposed to the > feature either, although I am not sure my grumpiness is enough today.
Petr assures me he's run through the proposed Grumpy Old Man gamut,
but I thought it was important we make this sort of thing explicit
:-)
So here I go, with a little autogrumpiness
1. What problem does the proposed feature solve?
Conveniently specifying your name and email address when you use
multiple identities in real life.
2. What are the user stories?
Eric has repositories for his University work, darcs hacking and
other hacking. He'd like his patches to be attributed to
Eric Kow <e.y....@brighton.ac.uk>,
Eric Kow <ko...@darcs.net>, and
Eric Kow <eric....@gmail.com> respectively.
To do this, he puts all three addresses into ${HOME}/.darcs/authors
one per line. The next time Darcs encounters a repository without
an author, it gives him a multiple choice menu, or the option to
enter a new address by hand.
3. Does this change any pre-existing workflows?
Does this introduce any incompatibilities?
One thing this changes is that folks with multiple email addresses
may rely more on the global preferences system, rather than using
darcs environment variables. It could be useful to think about
what role the environment variables really play in configuring darcs.
Maybe we could do away with those that merely set preferences.
There are no incompatibilities that I can tell. Old darcsen should
just ignore any authors past the first non-empty line, which seems
no worse than before.
4. How do we preserve the conceptual integrity of Darcs? Is the UI for this
feature really Darcs-ish?
The UI is not entirely Darcs-ish in that it introduces two new concepts:
* that each line in a certain kind of configuration file represents
an alternative option
* multiple choice UI where you plug in a number (eg "3" to indicate
your choice)
But we don't seem to have an alternative. Hopefully the new UI concepts
we introduce can be recycled for some other tasks, for example having
multiple default repos and being able to choose among them or something.
5. What are the possible unintended interactions with other pre-existing
features?
Should be none. Only the author lookup uses the ~/.darcs/author file
6. What are the alternative approaches to solving the same problem? Why do we
prefer this one?
One alternative might be never to specify a default, and just live with
typing
it in (or copy and pasting it) each time. But in the case of branching your
work and recording patches, this sort of delay can upset your train of
thought.
Another would be to just grin and bear it, remembering to change your
_darcs/authors for each repository, but then you'll tend to have recorded
a lot of patches under the wrong identity, only to think of it when it's too
late.
7. Who are the stakeholders? Who is going to benefit/be affected by this
feature: end-users, repo farms like patch-tag, darcs developers?
This is all about end users, particularly the sort of crazy user who would
actually care about which of their email addresses is being used in what
context.
--
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
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