Re: [Monotone-devel] restrictions rewrite

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 05:11:15AM +0100, Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:
> In message <address@hidden> on Thu, 23 Feb 2006 21:44:35 -0700, Derek 
> Scherger <address@hidden> said:
> 
> derek> There is also another branch off of this called 
> derek> net.venge.monotone.restrictions.wildcard-paths where I've
> derek> replaced the --depth argument with optional recursive
> derek> directories using a dir/... syntax suggested by njs on the
> derek> wiki.
> 
> I fail to see how the dir/... syntax can replace --depth.  How do you
> express something like 'monotone log dir --depth=3' using the
> recursive directory syntax?  I personally have no problem with having
> --depth removed, but I think you need to think about the consequences
> of removing it.

Historically, --depth exists entirely because of one person's
complaints that they couldn't restrict to the immediate contents of a
subdirectory, subdirectories always included their contents
recursively.

I.e., the only thing that anyone has actually expressed any desire for
is --depth=1 :-).  I'm not aware of any reason for having the general
facility.

Anyway, the important issue here is that we used to always interpret
directories as being shorthand for all their contents.  This was the
only reasonable thing to do, since we didn't _have_ directories
internally, they were just implied by the fact that they _had_
contents.

However, now that we do have explicit directory support, there should
be some way to express "commit just this directory itself" --
i.e., if it was added or removed or renamed, or had attrs modified,
commit just those facts, but not any changes to stuff inside it.

The question is, what's the right UI for this... I'm not convinced
that making it the default and requiring '...' otherwise is right,
since thinking about it now, referring to a whole subtree seems much
more common than referring to a directory alone.  (Compare, say, 'ls',
where the default is to list any directories mentioned, and you have
to say -d if you want to get information about the directory node
itself.)

So, it's basically a UI question -- what's most useful and
comfortable?

-- Nathaniel

-- 
.i dei jitfa fanmo xatra