vcs_info patch-format/applied-string awareness? (was: Re: [PATCH] Add code to Mercurial VCS backend to show topic if there is any.)

[Daniel Shahaf <d.s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel Shahaf wrote on Fri, 19 Jun 2020 10:07 +0000:
> Manuel Jacob wrote on Fri, 19 Jun 2020 04:06 +0200:
> > I’m concerned that most people won’t use the feature because they’re
> > not aware that it exists.  
> 
> Fair point.  Let's first see if we can enable the feature without user
> interaction at all.  If that doesn't pan out, then we can see about
> addressing the lack of awareness.

By the way, I think this point applies to the "show patch series"
functionality too.  That functionality is used by several vcs backends
(e.g., quilt, hg mq, git rebase), but is not enabled by default and
I suspect many people don't know it exists.

I'm referring to this:

[[[
$ cd Functions/VCS_Info/
$ rm -rf vcs-test/ 
$ zsh ./test-repo-git-rebase-apply
⋮
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in iota
⋮
zsh: exit 1     zsh ./test-repo-git-rebase-apply
$ (cd vcs-test/ && zsh) 
myref/rebase/+ f973ee0a1fe5
[5+2=7] ea03c123a587 r7: Append a line
% 
]]]

See the "[5+2=7] ea03c123a587 r7: Append a line" line.  (That line was
generated by setting zstyles to values such as those given in comments
at the top of ./test-repo-git-rebase-apply, plus some fine-tuning by
zshrc hooks.)

So, should we have patch series information displayed by default?  The
information about applied patches is parsed by default, but not shown
by default because the %m expando isn't in the default formats/actionformats
values.

Or alternatively, should we increase awareness of it?

Cheers,

Daniel

P.S.  The hg backend doesn't seem to support equivalent functionality
for the rebase/histedit commands; see the VCS_INFO_set-patch-format call.
hg mq support is present but not enabled by default.