Labs/Bespin/DesignDocs/Stati

Documenting What You Are Doing

A knowledge of your current actions is useful in a number of places.

• As a twitter-style status message
• In commit logs for files. If you hit save while your status what "fixing bug #42" then this might be a useful part of a commit log
• As a hit to what project goals are good to work on

I propose to add an 'iam' command which could be used as follows:

> iam fixing bug #42

(TODO: Should we have a 'i' command which does the same but strips off an initial 'am' prefix? Probably not)

It is my belief that your current actions are an important part of encouraging interactivity in development, and they also help solve the 'what did I do to this file?" problem when committing.

Since status messages are important throughout Bespin we should also have some permanently visible UI to remind the user what they are doing. In addition to the 'iam' command we should have a portion of a toolbar that displays and allows editing of status message.

Whenever a file is saved, the current status message should be added to a meta-data file, and the list of status messages (for all committed files) should then be proposed as a commit message on commit.

Access to a File's Status

- a command to to get what the people you follow are doing
- some way to get a list of the other users that are editing the same file as you (where same file has fairly loose definition)