[Monotone-devel] Re: [Monotone-commits-diffs] Revision c6569e455defcd6b0d889edcff0bb0fe6180a376

[Richard Levitte]

Nathaniel Smith writes: 

> Hmm, my knowledge of "cvs import" (and I'm guessing I'm not alone
> here?) is that "cvs import is for creating new projects". :-)

It's true that you can do that, but note that it doesn't convert the 
directory you imported into a working directory.  You actually have to 
checkout the imported stuff into a separate directory. 

The cvs import command is, however, really made to import external source 
into a vendor branch (and that's actually what it does when you import your 
own source, or just an empty directory), again and again, thereby tracking 
it.  That's where this command shows it's full power.  See 
http://ximbiot.com/cvs/wiki/index.php?title=CVS--Concurrent_Versions_System_ 
v1.12.12.1:_Tracking_third-party_sources 

> It is if 'import' is for importing projects to source control, and the
> previous revision is by definition null. 
>
> For the (almost unrelated and much less central?) use case of checking
> in a snapshot of some other source as a child of another revision, it
> seems like we should just have:
>  $ monotone co -r $OLDREV

At this point, we need to remove the contents, except for the MT directory, 
or 'drop --missing' would simply not work. 

>  $ <drop new stuff on top>
>  $ monotone drop --missing
>  $ monotone add --new
>  $ monotone commit

That's more or less what I think a full importing command should do.  And if 
there is no previous revision on the requested branch, it will simply create 
a first revision on that branch. 

> or so -- the point being that we should have some convenient way to
> issue the relevant add/drop commands, which is generally useful (e.g.,
> the options above, or mercurial has a special command 'addremove', I
> believe), but since that's _all_ that's special about importing
> external snapshots, there shouldn't be any specially named command for
> doing so...?

OK, that's an opinion.  I still maintain that a command the just adds a MT 
directory with contents to the designated directory will confuse most of the 
world (and particularly those who went in CVS school, which should be quite 
a lot of people). 

Cheers,
Richard 

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--
Richard Levitte                         address@hidden
                                      http://richard.levitte.org/ 

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including
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