Re: My plans for VC mode

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 11/22/2014 08:08 PM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> It's better than keeping the functions separate because the
> separation contributes in a significant way to making the
> interface a hairball that is difficult to understand and maintain.

Would that make the combined function's description shorter than the 
current `dir-status' one, in vc.el header? If yes, how?

I suspect that would make the details from `dir-status-files' get lost 
in the noise, whereas I like its "report on all requested files" 
semantics (here's why: 
https://github.com/dgutov/diff-hl/issues/25#issuecomment-57107335).

Even now, when the description is separate, almost every backend I tried 
currently fails to adhere to it in some respect, see 
http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=18579#5 and 
http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=18579#59.

> I should have been able to write SRC support in 90 minutes.  The fact
> that it took the inventor of both SRC and VC mode *two days* told
> me the API has gone very badly wrong.

Some things are just hard. And, backwards compatibility aside, usually 
we don't want to discard existing features.