Re: [Monotone-devel] 0.48 rants

[Aaron W. Hsu]

Hey Everyone,

With all the negative responses regarding the new changelog editor, I
just thought I would weigh in with something a little more positive. I
actually do like the changes, on a whole, and think that we shouldn't
just revert to the old behavior.

I did watch the discussion that went on when this feature went in, and I
mostly agreed with how things were going, so I did not comment.

I like that we have more changeable fields. The more the better in my
mind. When I get something in a text editor, I like to think that
whatever I will change will have some effect. I like that I can modify
dates, branches, authors, and so forth. The problem with where to enter
the changelog message really doesn't bother me so much, because we can
always use editor's positioning arguments to put the cursor in the
"right place" to start, and even without, we can allow for them to enter
things at the top too.

Actually, the "just start typing" methodology isn't really something I'm
used to in most other programs. When I work with email for example, and
I'm responding to a message in particular, I don't start typing at the
top except to put a little header in, at most. So this doesn't really
bother me.

I do like that the formatting for these types of displays was
normalized. We could get rid of some redundant information, which
wouldn't be a bad thing, but I do like that I can "preview" my commit in
a sense.

As a question, can I alter what is committed through the changelog
editor? At the moment, it does not seem like I can. That is one feature
I would like. Normally, my workflow goes something like: status to see
what has changed; diff to see those individual changes; a series of
commits to commit the pieces in the way that I want. For those last
pieces, it would be nice if I could just type 'mtn commit' and then edit
my message to select what will be committed and what will not, and to
what branch, and so forth. I like the idea of doing this in my editor.
AT the moment, when I tried to do this, it didn't seem to work, and gave
me some hoohah about the commit failing.

So, overall, I'm happy with this change, and while we could make some
adjustments to it, I do think that there is a great deal of positive
about this new changelog editor that I would like to keep around.

  Aaron W. Hsu