[Monotone-devel] Re: How to determine if a file is version controlled?

[Wim Oudshoorn]

Bruce Stephens <address@hidden> writes:

> Wim Oudshoorn <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I was trying to extend my emacs mode for monotone 
>> and for this I wanted to know if a certain file 
>> is tracked by monotone.  
>> To my surprise, I couldn't easily figure out an efficient way
>> to do this.
>
> Can't you just use "monotone ls known"?
>
> "monotone ls known <file>" will either print out just <file>, or print
> nothing (if the file exists but isn't tracked), or print an error (I
> presume using cerr) and return an error status.  So that's not very
> clean, but it seems OK to me.

As described somewhere else that is not really ideal, and very slow.

> I guess in automate you'd have to use "automate inventory", or
> something, which doesn't seem ideal.  Would be OK if you did it
> occasionally, though, say on startup or when you expected that it
> might have changed.

No not really.
It works for my emacs monotone mode that is similar to pcl-cvs,
there I just grab the whole project and show the information.

However, now I want to add a vc-mtn backend. And this backend
works on a file by file basis.  
One of the things to implement is a call that given a filename
needs to check if it is tracked by the versioning system.
Now this call is used everytime the user opens a file
in emacs.  So it is not acceptable to be slow and you can't
at startup just check the whole harddrive for all the monotone project.
Also because I do not know at all what files I am talking about
I just have to asume I have a random absolute path to begin with.

Wim Oudshoorn.