Re: [Quilt-dev] Submit patch: allow "quilt delete" to delete patch files

[Jean Delvare]

Hi all,

[Martin Quinson]
> I'm not sure that -r is a good idea. Sound like recursive to me.

I had been thinking about it before, and came up with -r too. I don't
quite see how "quilt delete" could be recursive, and there are quite a
few Unix commands using -r for different things (and using -R for
recursivity): ls and chmod come to mind.

> What about --purge instead?

I don't like it much.

> Or, since it's contradictory with the existance of --backup, maybe
> --remove, ie the long option only.
>
> After all, we can live with long options only, thanks to the completion ;)

I don't think so. Not everyone uses bash completion or zsh. Thois option
is likely to be typed often, as I can easily imagine that some users
will want to use it for some of their patches and not the other ones (so
it can't be set in QUILT_DELETE_OPTIONS). As quilt does seem to offer
only one name (either long or short) for each option, I'd go with -r.

About the patch itself: I like it, and it looks OK to me (although I did
not try it yet). +1.

The only objection I would have is on the help formulation for --backup.
It reads:

> --backup
>        Create a backup copy of a deleted patch file as patch~.
>        Only supported when used with \"-r\".

I think that this formulation is confusing. The operation of doing a
backup copy of a file as you delete it has a name, it's called renaming
a file. Additionally, the term "supported" doesn't quite fit here, as
using --backup with -r will not trigger an error (nor do I think it
should), it will simply have no effect. So I'd propose the following
help text as a replacement:

--backup
       Rename the patch file to patch~ rather than deleting it.
       Ignored if not used with \"-r\".

Thanks,
--
Jean Delvare