Ideas/PatchViewer

A patch viewer is a program that builds a visual representation of the darcs dependency graph.

See the video in http://projects.haskell.org/camp/unique for an example of a patch viewer in action.

Use cases

What kinds of questions would a patch viewer help users to answer?

Features

  • Support for darcs matchers (—match, —tag, —last)
  • Venn diagram visualisation of commonality between patches? issue1200

Comments

  • I have 7000 patches in my repository: what would be a reasonable graphical representation of this?
  • Perhaps showing all 7000 patches at a time would be a bit much -could we show patches up to the last tag?
  • Interactivity:
  • Perhaps we could have collapsed nodes: if I click on a node, the patch viewer could expand it to a set of patches and their dependencies.
  • Darcs does not store a dependency graph. Instead, it stores patches in a sequence and computes some dependencies on the fly by commuting patches. What might be interesting work is to have some tool (or library) which gives you a graph for some set of patches