Re: [Monotone-devel] changelog editor issues

[Francis Russell]

Stephen Leake wrote:

> The first draft is now pushed. I think it does everything everyone asked
> for; give it a try.
> 

Hi,

I took a quick look and it's certainly an improvement over the previous
template. Thanks for all the work. These are my comments:

- There's a missing space between "Date:" and the date.

- I think something is seriously wrong if we actually need to tell users
 where to place their commit message. The only person who I can imagine
who would need this message is a complete first-time user who has never
touched any form of version control before. In this case I'm pretty sure
they'd be using the tutorial. I'd consider deleting that line entirely.
Alternatively, the next comment replaces it.

- subversion and mercurial handle aborting commits by checking to see if
the message was empty. Perhaps the "REMOVE" and "Enter a" lines could be
replaced by: "-- Enter a commit message or leave empty to abort --" and
check to see if the white-space trimmed changelog has any characters. I
think that is still superior to that whole line deletion thing as it
requires less effort to abort. Also, it has far fewer capitals :).

- I do realise I suggested the original lines. Shortening them a little:

"Certificate values may be modified"
"Modifications below this line are ignored"

Anything to cut down reading time/thinking time/clutter.

Rather more subjective/personal preference comments:

- Just to keep the nice block structure, maybe the newline between the
"Changes against parent" and "patched" lines could go. I only suggest
this because the patched lines otherwise look like a separate block of
text from the "changes against parent" line. I do realise this is the
same format as "mtn status" so it might be undesirable to change it.

- I think it would be nice to have another newline at the top, just to
separate the changelog section from everything else when the user starts
typing.

As I said before, some of these are rather subjective.

All that then gives something like this:

"


-- Enter a commit message or leave empty to abort --
-- Certificate values may be modified --
Branch: ...
Author: ...
Date: ...

-- Modifications below this line are ignored --
Changes against parent 7009c1b77c694e0eb0dc5b791676c86f04acc675
  patched  ...
  patched  ...
"

Regards,

Francis