Re: [Quilt-dev] 32093 - QUILT_COLORS

[Martin Quinson]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 10:56:35AM +0100, Daniel Lovasko wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> my solution for this bug: https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?32093 is included 
> in the attachment.
> What do you think?

> +\item[\textsf{QUILT\_COLORS}]
> +By default, quilt uses its predefined color set in order to be more 
> +comprehensible when distiguishing various types of patches, eg. 
> +applied/unapplied, failed, etc. Setting this variable enables overriding 
> +values of certain subset of used colors.

I would say that this is very interesting: I did not know of this
coloring feature: the commands series and patch did not document their
--color parameter, while push was very terse on the meaning of the
parameter argument. I just fixed that, thanks for pointing me on it.

But unfortunately, after reading this new documentation, I was very
far from being able to use this feature. I had to dig into the code
and googling around.

I think that you need to say explicitely that the default setting is:
diff_hdr=32:diff_add=36:diff_mod=35:diff_rem=35:diff_hunk=33:diff_ctx=35:diff_cctx=33:patch_offs=33:patch_fuzz=35:patch_fail=31:patch_applied=32:series_app=32:series_top=33:series_una=00:clear=00

with a word on the syntax. It's a colon (:) separated list of
elements, each being of the form 
  <format name>=<forground color>[;<background color>]

It would be interesting to document the whole list of format names
since some are trivially understood (such as diff_hdr) but some other
are less obvious (such as diff_cctx but that may be just me). This may
be part of the command's documentation (in their usage function), as
I don't see reused color names between commands at the first glance.

You also want to specify that the color code is following the
classical bash color escaping, with information retrieved from eg,
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/colorizing.html#AEN20229

After that, you can say that the content of QUILT_COLORS is simply
used to superseed default values. So if I set
QUILT_COLORS='diff_hdr=35;44', I'll get my diff headers in magenta
over blue instead of the default green with background unchanged.

Well, I fear that it takes a full documentation section to explain it
all, actually.

Thanks for your time,
Mt.


-- 
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   -- Le Chat