[Monotone-devel] Re: CLI / path restrictions.

[Bruno Hertz]

Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden> writes:

> It actually had never occurred to me that one might expect giving a
> directory to mean "only the first level of stuff in that directory";
> maybe we need a straw poll on what people's intuitions here are?

Who ever called 'ls' with a directory name as param might think
different. Shell expansion is non recursive either. Actually, most
commands work non recursive without explicit request. Take rm -rf as
another example.

> Part of the problem is that "commit dir/" just can't mean "commit
> changes in the top level of dir/, but nothing below that".  I mean...
> I dunno, I can't imagine that being reasonable.  So, there's a theory
> which says that everything else should be consistent with "commit" --
> for "diff" and "status", I think, this argument is very powerful;
> "diff foo" should show exactly the same changes as "commit foo" will
> commit.  Works for "revert" too, really; "diff" should show exactly
> what "revert" will throw away.  For the ls family of commands, I guess
> one could make an argument either way; "consistency with ls(1)" vs.
> "consistency with the rest of monotone".

If you want directory restrictions to act recursively per default,
please do so, I for one don't really care. But providing the means to
limit the level of recursiveness would still make an awful lot of
sense.

Apart from that, if 'commit .' committed the files in pwd only I
really can't say I'd be that surprised.

Regards, Bruno.