[Unison-hackers] UI patches, build script

[frederik at ofb.net]

I'm not sure if my emails are getting through here, but I created some patches to attempt to correct the UI behavior which I found confusing. I thought maybe I should share them in case they are useful:

https://github.com/navarum/tweaks/tree/master/unison/patches

The same repo contains a build script which I use to deploy Unison across different platforms. It builds a fixed version of Unison against a fixed version of OCaml. This makes it easier for me to run Unison between (say) Raspbian and Arch. Comments welcome.

Best wishes,

Frederick

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 02:15:34PM -0800, frederik at ofb.net wrote:
>Dear Unison hackers,
>
>I think I've mentioned this before, but often when using Unison I want to take a break from answering questions and just reconcile the changes that I've selected. For example in the following interaction
>
>    new file <==== new file   R/Makeconf  [f] <
>    new file <-?-> new file   asound.conf  [] s
>
>    Proceed with propagating updates? [] y
>
>I selected that R/Makeconf should be propagated in one direction. Then I perused the increasingly longer list of commands and found one that looks appropriate:
>
>    s                     stop reconciling and go to the proceed menu
>
>I'm not sure what the "proceed menu" is, but since I selected only one update I'm pretty sure that only one thing is going to happen when I "stop reconciling" and allow Unison to "proceed". However, when I hit "s" and "y" then Unison proceeds to copy a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't ask for, and I have to Ctrl-C, which doesn't even do anything, so then I have to Ctrl-Z Ctrl-C, but meanwhile a lot of files have been copied, generally making a mess that I have to spend time cleaning up. Here's a fuller summary: http://ix.io/24Dn
>
>By contrast, if I hit "/" at every prompt, to skip to the next item, then nothing is propagated.
>
>My questions: Is my use case somehow unusual? Where did I go wrong? Or is it OK for all users to have an experience like this when learning how to use your program?
>
>And what exactly does 's' do, and why doesn't it have a more accurate description in the UI?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Frederick
>