Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: [BUG] feature plan -- Selected inventory

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Aaron Bentley <address@hidden>

    > Tom Lord wrote:
    > > I think arch will _always_ have to inventory the whole project tree
    > > that you are working with but, other than that, speed is one of the
    > > motivations for the selections-based features.

    > I guess I don't understand properly here.  Why couldn't the user specify 
    > a regex on the commandline that would cause files it matched (in ORIG 
    > and MOD) to be treated as precious?  (or as NOT precious)

(Assuming that I understand your question correctly...)

Suppose that I have a selection specification that picks out a subset
of the ORIG tree and my MOD tree.  Sure, I could `inventory' keeping
that selection spec in mind and, if the selection spec doesn't have
any id-based rules, avoid inventorying all of ORIG or MOD.

But now if I'm computing a changeset:  files may appear in the
selected part of MOD that were absent in ORIG or they may be ORIG but
not in MOD.   Are those adds and deletes?  Or are they renames from
and to some non-selected part of the tree?   The only way to tell is
to inventory all of ORIG and all of MOD.

-t