Post by Stig BrautasetRepeating myself: Linus scans a patchset in his mailclient, decides he
likes it, then applies it (the actual changeset he applies might not be
the one in the email body -- it's not for bk changesets now, right?).
Thus, patches in email can basically just be the output of `tla
show-changeset --diffs'[1], with a special arch stanza[2] tacked on.
Then we would have maybe an extra option to `tla replay --exact' or just
extend the syntax a bit to accept the arch stanza as an argument and
apply the changeset.
One thing I think is important is that it should not be necessary to
register the archive -- the new merge/slurp command should be clever
enough to register the archive correctly from the stanza. To avoid
cluttering up peoples ~/.arch-params/=locations, there should be an
option to delete the archive registration afterwards if it didn't
already exist.
I think this is a good idea.
I'm starting to think I'd like to see something even fancier: a nice
GUI or Emacs mode that helps me manage all of my branches and my
mirrors of the archives of people who contribute to arch.
For example, I'd like just a "point-and-click" list of all the
archives of contributors, listing the archive name and location, the
last time I updated my mirror, and so forth.
If I click on it, I could browse whats-missing (in both directions),
individual changesets, computed changesets relative to my mainline,
notes I might have taken about this archive, etc.
I'd like to be able to select changes and merge techniques and have
the merge invocation automated.
This relates to what you're talking about in the following way: I'd
like to give the little database that backs that interface its own
email address. If you want to tell me about new patches to merge,
you send mail to that address and its noted in the interface.
Conversely, I'd like this tool to be able to generate such email.
For example, perhaps I can select some of my own revisions and push a
button that sends email to the database for some upstream maintainer.
The next time he fires up this GUI, he sees a notice "please review
these patches ..." attached to his entry for my archive.
In other words, I don't want to use my general-purpose MUA for
exchange of this completely regular patch-flow email -- I want to use
what is, in effect, a special purpose MUA.
I realize that's a pretty abstract description short on details -- I
started to write a longer one but it was turning out to be _very_ long
so I stopped. But, get the idea?
-t