It's bad practice (I believe) to have really long patch names.  Let
"long" be "more than seventy characters".  It would be useful if darcs
reminded users when they were naughty in this respect.

Here's a mockup.  Note that it tells users about the Right Way,
i.e. --edit.

    $ darcs rec -am 'Disable friendly fire by default.'

No change here, because the name is ≤70 characters.

    $ darcs rec -a
    What is the patch name? [user types long string here]

    Warning: patch names should be concise, but the supplied name is
    very long.  Use --edit-description if you need to add additional
    commentary.

    Change patch name? [Y/n/q]

The user can choose N to override this warning, Y to go back to the
patch name step, or q to abort the entire record operation.

    $ darcs rec -am "Long example `seq 99`."
    Warning: patch names should be concise, but the supplied name is
    very long.  Use --edit-description if you need to add additional
    commentary.  Continuing anyway.

Because used in "non-interactively", this just prints a warning and
continues on anyway.

This is my first draft.  It only works if you use -m.  To make it work
with interactive use, I think I probably have to change get_log
extensively.

Sun Nov 16 18:45:55 EST 2008  Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com>
  * draft: Resolve issue 1093: warn about ugly patch names.

Attachments

• draft_-resolve-issue-1093_-warn-about-ugly-patch-names_.dpatch
• unnamed

Eric said:

YES - warn on patches starting with '-'
 YES - warn on "strange" patch names http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1000
 MAYBE - warn on overly long patch names (as this could cause some
         concrete practical problems for other folks, wrt wrapping)
 NO - warn on patch names < 10
 NO - warn on punctuation