Re: [Monotone-devel] rfc on h: selector behavior

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 07:32:08AM +1000, Daniel Carosone wrote:
> I'm also not sure that all of these requirements and usages are
> satisfied by simply 'magic selectors'.  I've been thinking for a while
> that we might be needing some form of selector algebra on the command
> line. What if we could use the erase_ancestors() syntax, and other set
> and tree operations, directly?  The 'fantasy syntax' lca: examples
> given recently are a really good illustration of what i've been
> thinking, too.  It might start with an OR operation in selector
> strings, to complement the / for AND.  Many of the magic selectors are
> then just some syntactic sugar around frequently used longer forms.

Well, it'd certainly be interesting to look at ideas for how to make
this syntax work.  I'm not sure the goal is to make the _perfect_
general purpose revision selecting machinery, though -- it seems like
at some point you want to just switch over to your existing general
purpose tools (like sh, or a scripting language, or the like), and the
existing automate commands are IME quite composable for expressing
complex rules like that.  So the real question might be not "what's
useful", but "where should the switchover point be"...

I guess the comparative rarity of decent scripting on win32 might be
an argument for more power before having to switch over; dunno.

-- Nathaniel

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