Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: .mt-ignore and .cvsignore files

[Nuno Lucas]

[14-05-2005 1:05, Nathaniel Smith escreveu]
> On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 11:40:37AM +0100, Nuno Lucas wrote:
> > I'm one of those that decided to use monotone to version my /etc dir
> > and have this same problem with a /etc/init.d/net.lo file. Monotone
> > simply refuses to add it because it is an "ignorable" file.
>
> It's not clear what to do here.  One solution that I thought of was
> that 'ignore' only applies to files that are found recursively -- so
> if you say "add init.d/", then net.lo will be ignored, but if you
> actually straight-out say "add init.d/net.lo", then it will still be
> added.

Yeah, that's what my instinct also tells me is the best solution.

> The problem with this is that it makes "add ." and "add *" quite
> surprisingly different, so I'm dubious.

I understand your point. On the other hand there is no way to be fully
sure they will always be the same, as "*" is a shell thing and it's up
to the shell to return us the same as . would do (for example, I could
have a shell that has an option somewhere to never include a
*.my_extension file in the * expansion).

If we take that into account, then we can just ignore the differences,
as it appears now as a problem of the user (shell), not the monotone
program.

> Any ideas?  How do other systems handle the "no, really, I actually
> don't want to ignore this file, even though I said so elsewhere" case?

As a compromise, we could show a "Add 'ignorable' file 'xxx.obj'?
[Yes/No/always YES/always NO]" prompt when we reach this situation.

Another option is to have a "--force" option, to make it include
"ignorable" files. That way the user has no surprises.

I confess it's the first time I had this problem (it's also the first
time I decided to version /etc, and it was just a few days back) so
I have no idea on how others handle it.

> (In your case, I really would recommend overriding the ignore hook,
> since the default really is designed for software development
> projects...)

I'm not versioning all files in etc, anyway, so in this particular case
that file is not important for me (unless I would want to edit it and
make sure my edits would not be rewritten by a system update).

And by the way, keep up the good job. I find monotone an excellent tool
that only needs time to mature into a great piece of software! :)

Best regards,
~Nuno Lucas