Re: VC command for showing outgoing changes

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA>]

> It would be nice to have a VC command for showing the outgoing changes
> for distributed VC systems (i.e. the log of the changes that will be
> pushed when you do a VC push).
> Let's call this method vc-outgoing (name suggestions are welcome).

I think before that we should have support for a `push' backend operation.

> vc-hg-outgoing does this, but it's only for mercurial, it would be good
> to have a generic method for doing such a thing.

Agreed.

> vc-outgoing cannot quite use that because most commands that are defined
> for log-view-mode do not make sense (annotate, next/previous file, show
> version).

The next/previous file seem to make just as much (or as little) sense
for this as for log-view.  Also, why don't annotate and show-version
make sense?

> One thing we can do is to create a log-view-base-mode and have
> log-view-mode and log-view-outgoing-mode derive from this mode, and have
> log-view-mode and log-view-outgoing-mode define their own commands and
> key bindings.

Since each backend typically creates its own vc-<foo>-log-view-mode,
that tend to lead to the need for "multiple inheritance" in
define-derived-mode.  Given the lack of support for such a monster right
now, we should probably stick to something simpler, e.g. add
a log-view-outgoing binary var, behaving kind of like a minor-mode and
controlling availability of some extra bindings.

> Something similar can be done for incoming changes.

Indeed.


        Stefan