MQ usability

[Peter Williams]

On 11/08/09 10:18, Peter Williams wrote:
> On 11/08/09 02:25, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
>> So people invariably complain that MQ is hard to use. On the other
>> hand, everyone recognizes that it's also quite powerful. I'd like to
>> fix the former without losing the latter. Therefore, I have a few
>> proposals to improve on the current situation:
>>
>> - remove qgoto, qnext, qprev, qtop: this functionality is already
>> covered quite well by qpop, qpush, qseries and log.
>>
>> - possibly remove qsave/qrestore as well, since no one seems to use
>> them (and many people get confused by them).
>
> qsave and its usefulness in updating ones patches when the underlying
> code changes (see page 197 of "Mercurial, The Definitive Guide",
> ISBN-978-0-596-80067-3) is the MQ feature that most distinguishes from
> other patch management systems (such as the very popular "quilt"
> <http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/quilt>). So it would be a big
> mistake to remove it.

I missed a chance to plug gwsmhg 
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/gwsmhg/> here.  It's MQ page includes 
a drop down menu that allows the user to go through the steps described 
in this section of the guide methodically.

My older patch management GUI, gquilt 
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/gquilt/>, which started as a GUI 
wrapper for quilt but can also use mq as a back end lacks this feature 
as it requires a level of integration with the SCM system controlling 
the underlying code that gquilt doesn't have.  Adding that integration 
was considered too difficult hence gwsmhg with a page for MQ management 
(i.e. qsave was the inspiration for gwsmhg).

Peter
-- 
Peter Williams                                   pwil3058 at bigpond.net.au

"Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious."
  -- Ambrose Bierce