This is work in progress and I'd appreciate comments and
opinions.

This patch adds the flag --machine-readable to whatsnew.

It implies --summary, and makes lines previously shown as:

    M f -N +M rP

now simply shown as:

    M f

Which makes parsing by third party tools much easier
(I'm adding Darcs support to geanyvc).

Another problem solved by this change, is that (very
improbably), a file can be named "f -N" or "f +M" and
be wrongly parsed before this patch.

Apart from this, I wondered if file moves should be
shown as one add and one remove, but this is more
complicated. In cases where we do the renames y -> z
and x -> y, we should maybe show:

    M y
    A z
    D x

This is what mercurial would do. But with Darcs this
seem to require some rewriting of the prim sequence
processed by whatsnew.. I don't think it's worth it.

Note that Bazaar (another system that really tracks
file renames) prefixes the file move lines with R (for
"rename") and the "delete" lines with D (in the output of
`bazaar status --short`). In Darcs these lines are recognizable
by the fact that they start with a space character.

1 patch for repository http://darcs.net:

patch 622d61ee9b425043c0667cf5c9877a27bad92455
Author: Guillaume Hoffmann <guillaumh@gmail.com>
Date:   Tue Jan 12 10:20:44 ART 2016
  * --machine-readable flag for more parseable whatsnew

Attachments

• __machine_readable-flag-for-more-parseable-whatsnew.dpatch
• patch-preview.txt
• unnamed

I changed the ouput of file renames, we now have the following:

    $ darcs status 
      ./x -> ./y
    $ darcs status --machine-readable 
    From ./x
    To ./y

1 patch for repository http://darcs.net:

patch 6b885c1b754cf932f3eaa4042de4d651f563aba1
Author: Guillaume Hoffmann <guillaumh@gmail.com>
Date:   Thu Jan 14 08:33:07 ART 2016
  * --machine-readable flag for more parseable whatsnew

Attachments

• __machine_readable-flag-for-more-parseable-whatsnew.dpatch
• patch-preview.txt
• unnamed

Mentionning the file move output format in the help string.

2 patches for repository http://darcs.net:

patch 6b885c1b754cf932f3eaa4042de4d651f563aba1
Author: Guillaume Hoffmann <guillaumh@gmail.com>
Date:   Thu Jan 14 08:33:07 ART 2016
  * --machine-readable flag for more parseable whatsnew

patch 341bffd98bf967aa0a8c0bb6eb42d0d2c4d2732f
Author: Guillaume Hoffmann <guillaumh@gmail.com>
Date:   Sat Jan 16 08:53:36 ART 2016
  * whatsnew --machine-readable help string update on file moves

Attachments

• __machine_readable-flag-for-more-parseable-whatsnew.dpatch
• patch-preview.txt
• unnamed

Greenlighted by Ganesh on IRC, hence accepted.

I figured instead of having `From f` and `To g` we can as well have `F f`
and `T g` since it is not ambiguous and the output is more homogeneous.

I bet nobody has written a parser for watsnew --machine-readable yet
so we should be good...

1 patch for repository http://darcs.net:

patch 391afbf64555c60cd9f60e3122c1bce3a15db5ab
Author: Guillaume Hoffmann <guillaumh@gmail.com>
Date:   Fri Jan 29 07:36:19 ART 2016
  * use F and T instead of From and To in whatsnew --machine-readable

Attachments

• patch-preview.txt
• unnamed
• use-f-and-t-instead-of-from-and-to-in-whatsnew-__machine_readable.dpatch

I'm going to self-accept it now. This is a change of strings in a patch
that was already accepted.