Re: bug#881: patch for bug #881

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

  > > How should it work? We don't have any nice generic mechanism/UI for
  > > doing VC backend specific things in the commit buffer.
  > 
  > It's a general concept, although it's not supported by all backends.

The general concept is that backends want to do backend specific things :-)

For example git might want to add "--signoff"
Or might want to add "--amend", in which case the log for the latest
commit should be inserted in the log-edit buffer for further editing.

  > I'd imagine some log-edit-mode command that set log-edit-author and is
  > then somehow passed to VC via the log-edit-callback which then passes it
  > to the backend as an additional argument to the `commit' operation.
  >
  > Maybe the easiest way is to store the info directly in the text in the
  > form of a "Author: ..." line somewhere.
  > 
  > Along similar lines, we'd like a way to pass the "--fixes" arg to Bzr,
  > so maybe we should let log-edit-mode use a buffer in a RFC822-like format,
  > where backends may recognize some headers ("Subject", "Author",
  > "Fixes", ...) and discard others.

This would be helpful, but not enough, we also want to have some key
bindings, menu entries for backend specific things.

So how about starting by replacing the call to `log-edit' in
`vc-log-edit' with (vc-call-backend backend 'log-edit)

and then each backend that so desires can implement a mode derived from
log-edit and do whatever it wants (like we do for log-view).