I typed "darcs tag ." unthinkingly, which tagged the repo with "." without
prompting me. Since no one is likely to want to create a tag called ".", perhaps
darcs could prompt "did you really mean to create a 1-character tag?" in this case?

Congratulations, Tim!  You're our 1000th bug.

Is something like this really worth putting in the code, though?  You already
get feedback telling you it just created a TAG '.', which you could just obliterate.

Thoughts?

>>>Congratulations, Tim!  You're our 1000th bug.<<<

Yay! Do I get a cookie? :P

Anyway, I don't know how to obliterate a tag offhand. Of course I could go read
the manual and find out how. But that's just extra cognitive load which could
have been avoided if darcs had prompted me in the first place. Since creating a
tag called "." is almost always going to be a mistake, I think it's best to
write the code, which only has to be done once, but could potentially save time
and effort for more than one user.

I'm not passionate about this, but from an usability point of view, I think the
answer is clear.

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 21:19:48 -0000, Tim Chevalier wrote:
> Anyway, I don't know how to obliterate a tag offhand. Of course I could go read
> the manual and find out how. But that's just extra cognitive load which could
> have been avoided if darcs had prompted me in the first place. Since creating a
> tag called "." is almost always going to be a mistake, I think it's best to
> write the code, which only has to be done once, but could potentially save time
> and effort for more than one user.

Thanks.  Well, for what it's worth, tags are patches like any other, and
can be obliterated with darcs obliterate.

I wonder what we can do to make this more apparent.

Anyway, it's there as a ProbablyEasy bug for any new developers to try
fixing.  I'm not too enthused, but I can see your point :-)

I think even printing out a warning (without prompting) would be better than the
current behavior, though if you're adding code to warn, you might as well add
code to prompt.

IMO Warning is better than prompting as it's less likely to screw up scripts.

Martin DeMello suggested:
"what they oughta do is spit to stderr 'Did you really mean to tag this '.'? If
that was a mistake, paste the following line in at the prompt to undo it: ...'."
Which I like.

Yeah, this is similar to the proposed solution for
http://bugs.darcs.net/issue395 -- do not ask for confirmation, but make it easy
for the user to undo.

Adding our swanky new need-volunteer tag (we know what to do, now somebody
please step up!)

The following patch updated the status of issue1000 to be resolved:

* resolve issue1000: warn when tags are too short (length name <2)