I believe this is one of the minor to-do list items we came up with in FOSDEM.

Somebody ought to implement a 'darcs cat' command which lists the contents of a
file managed by darcs.  This would be useful because we could pass flags to it
like --to-patch (?).

> > I believe this is one of the minor to-do list items we came up with in FOSDEM.
> >
> > Somebody ought to implement a 'darcs cat' command which lists the contents of a
> > file managed by darcs.  This would be useful because we could pass flags to it
> > like --to-patch (?).
>
> This sounds good.  I like the idea, but would 'cat' really be obvious to people?

Something like 'view' might make sense, but what would you do for
binary files?  In that case, you would probably want to redirect to a
file.  Which makes me think of the opposite, which is a 'get-file'
command that can optionally be redirected to stdout.  Of course then
you have to worry about files overwriting the current version in the
current directory.  So maybe 'view' is the command but when you try to
view a binary file it will normally just mention something about the
file.  If you use the redirect command line option it will write out
the actual file.

I don't have a real solution right now, I'm just bringing up some issues.

> Somebody ought to implement a 'darcs cat' command which lists the
> contents of a file managed by darcs.  This would be useful because
> we could pass flags to it like --to-patch (?).

FWIW, I'd use this command in vc-darcs.el.  I'm currently hacking
around its lack by doing the Emacs Lisp equivalent of

    darcs diff --from-patch=$1 | patch -p1 -R

which, I hope you'll agree, is ridiculous.

I believe it should be a subcommand of ``darcs query'', the ``darcs help''
output is already too long.

I also have my doubts about the name ``cat'', but that's the best we
could come up with.

And no, I don't find it intuitive to overload blame...

                                        Juliusz

On 2/28/06, Eric Kow <bugs@darcs.net> wrote:
>
> New submission from Eric Kow <06sd1oi02@sneakemail.com>:
>
> I believe this is one of the minor to-do list items we came up with in FOSDEM.
>
> Somebody ought to implement a 'darcs cat' command which lists the contents of a
> file managed by darcs.  This would be useful because we could pass flags to it
> like --to-patch (?).

This sounds good.  I like the idea, but would 'cat' really be obvious to people?

Thanks,
Jason

David agrees that we use the query subcommand framework for this, and so
renaming the bug.

no matter how it is called, it would be nice to have it.

Resolved in unstable with:

Thu Aug  2 06:08:13 CEST 2007  Eric Kow <eric.kow@gmail.com>
  * [issue141] Implement darcs show contents command.