Re: informal poll: do you script interactive darcs?

Hi Eric,

we feed darcs input from scripts.  For example on our integration
server we pull the next patch from an incoming repository and unpull
patches that have been amended in the incoming repository.  This is
all quick and dirty code that tends to break sometimes (not because of
darcs interaction but because of other assumptions that only hold in
95% of the cases and the 5% are too hard to automate).  For real
software, like the "darcs patch manager" we compile against darcs. (We
use DPM in combination with Rietveld to do our reviews and track what
needs to be done for which submitted patch.)

We'd love user interface improvements and wouldn't mind updating our
dirty scripts.  Scripting interactive programs is always tricky and we
are prepared that it will break sooner or later.  Most of the times
the fix will be easy.

It's more important that patch files are upwards and downwards
compatible.  At some time I built the following darcs version "2.7.3
(+ 300 patches)" but I can't use it to send patches to our "darcs
patch checker" service (which just applies the patch to a copy of the
current head repository and runs darcs check --test).  Our "DPC" runs
darcs 2.3 from Ubuntu and tries to "darcs apply" the patch bundle but
fails with this message:

1 patch for repository darcs.umidev.de:repos/all/DociData:

Tue Dec 20 10:08:24 CET 2011  wehr <at> factisresearch.com
  * TMP: use snapshot of roundtrip-scala

Re: informal poll: do you script interactive darcs?

We do some darcs automation, but never feed it "yes" or "no" answers.

   Mark

Re: informal poll: do you script interactive darcs?

On 27 Dec 2011, at 22:05, Eric Kow wrote:
> We have some changes we'd like to experiment with in the interactive UI (see in particular issue1920). 
Unfortunately, the changes may break programs that script darcs by trying to talk to the interactive UI
(feeding it y/n answers).

Thanks to everybody for their responses!  As I understand it, people who have responded are either happy to
amend their scripts as needed, or are scripting the darcs the "right" way (using the library).

This sort of freedom to experiment is one of the advantages of being a small program.  There may be some
instability as we work out what really we want the UI to do, but the changes should be fairly minor.  Mostly
adding, removing, juggling confirmation prompts.  The sorts of decisions involved are “do we want a
final last regrets prompt” (so that you can revisit the very last patch/change), “what accept key do
we tie it to” ('y' or 'd'); “can we remove the unrevert impossible prompt” etc.  UI tuning.

--

-- 
Eric Kow <http://erickow.com>

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Re: informal poll: do you script interactive darcs?

Eric Kow <kowey <at> darcs.net> writes:

> Could I just do a quick little poll to see who's out there?  Does
> anybody script darcs in such a manner, even if informally with echo
> yyyynyyd | darcs foo? (Our test scripts do that)
>
> What do you use it for?

The Emacs integrations (vc-darcs, darcsum, dvc(?)) will probably be
affected.  This is the sort of reason I wanted vc-darcs in the darcs
repo .