Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: How do I find out what "monotone update" plans to do?

[Derek Scherger]

Bruce Stephens wrote:
> I guess I could use "monotone heads" to find a likely revision ID, and
> then monotone diff to see the changes.  And interdiff to reverse the
> patch (if I understand it correctly, I'll get the patch from the ID to
> what's in my working tree, and if I want to know what update is going
> to do, I want the other direction).

if you do a diff with two revision id's arranged correctly (current then 
head) I think the diff should be in the right direction. it's certainly 
not a particularly nice ui though. monotone-viz is much better for 
looking at the graph to see what's gone one but a better command line 
method would certainly also be good.

> Seems rather clumsy.  Is there really no suitable way to limit what
> "monotone log" outputs?  For example, restricting it to revisions on a
> branch seems like an obvious thing to do: indeed, I find it surprising
> that specifying --branch=... doesn't seem to do that.  Or allow a
> selector, to see all the logs which match?

I was just looking at the darcs manual which describes --patch, 
--patches, --from-patch, --to-patch etc. which look interesting. 
certainly logging a selected set of revisions would be good, as would 
logging everything between a specified pair of revisions, as would 
logging revisions before or after a particular revision (which is what 
you seem to be looking for in this case), as would logging forwards and 
backwards.

on the restrictions branch I used --revision in place of revision id 
command line arguments that were replaced with file names. perhaps 
something like --revision/--revisions, and --before/--after which would 
all accept selectors would be good.

another possibility is to be more explicit and use things like --branch, 
--date, --author, etc. although these might break down in a case such as 
--after foo --before bar. commands that require a single revision could 
presumably fail if they match zero or multiple revisions, while commands 
such as log could list the details of all matched revisions.

personally, I find myself typing things like 'monotone log | head -n 
100' quite often, and also looking for ways to find revisions with 
certain things in their changelog certs or file specific diffs.

there's also been some talk of various ways to specify certain parents 
or children of revisions which would be good too.

I was looking at XPath the other day and it almost seems strangely 
relevant... ;)

Cheers,
Derek