Re: [Monotone-devel] non-recursive add considered harmful

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hi,

Ulf Ochsenfahrt wrote:
> And I think it is a really really bad idea if these two disagree in 
> which files are unknown, i.e., if mtn ls unknown doesn't list files 
> recursively, but mtn add --unknown does add them recursively.

Hmm... I've read through the archives (especially the thread at [1]) and 
thought about this issue. Before continuing on debating on recursiveness 
of our commands, I'd like to distinguish between recursing into known 
and recursing into unknown directories. Let's see what we currently (as 
of 0.33) have:

                         recurses for     recursive for
                          known dirs       unknown dirs

mtn commit foo/              yes                n/a
mtn diff foo/                yes                n/a
mtn log foo/                 yes                n/a
mtn add foo/                 n/a                no
mtn add --unknown            yes                no
mtn add foo/bar/x            yes                yes
mtn drop foo/                yes                n/a
mtn drop --missing           yes                n/a
mtn add foo/bar/x            yes                n/a
mtn revert                   yes                yes
mtn ls known                 yes                n/a
mtn ls missing               yes                n/a
mtn ls unknown               yes                no
mtn ls ignored               yes                no

.mtn-ignore                  yes                yes

Obviously, we are very consistent regarding known directories: we 
recursively iterate through them everywhere. And this is how it should be.

Looking at unknown directories, we are not very consistent. The add and 
drop commands don't recurse into unknown directories, except if you want 
to add a file in an unknown directory.

Similarly, 'mtn revert' happily re-adds complete directories and it's 
contents, no matter if those were dropped recursively or one by one.

Another inconsistency, IMO, is the .mtn-ignore file. If you put an 
unknown directory in there, it's a recursive ignorance: all the files in 
the (unknown) ignored directory are ignored as well, you don't have to 
add them all to .mtn-ignore.

Yet another inconsistency is the fact, that we handle unknown 
directories different from known directories. Which, for example, leads 
to the strange behavior of 'mtn add --unknown', which recursively 
searches in known directories, but does not recurse into the directories 
it has just added (and are known by now). (See Dan's example up thread [2].)

These three inconsistencies (plus my gut feeling) are the main reasons, 
I'm voting for making all these commands recursive by default. Including 
'mtn add', 'mtn drop' and 'mtn ls unknown'.

AFAICT, 'mtn add' has been made non-recursive between version 0.30 and 
0.31. I've only found few discussion about why, see [3]. Making 'add' as 
well as 'drop' recursive by default does not harm, because 'mtn revert' 
easily (and recursively) reverts the addition or deletion. However, 
especially for automation purpose, we probably need to add a '--depth' 
argument, or at least a '--non-recursive'.

Derek's complaint [1] about 'mtn ls unknown' showing so many files lead 
to making 'mtn ls unknown' non-recursive. But I'd argue that this should 
better be handled by .mtn-ignore. Additionally, I'd like to point out, 
that letting monotone handle the home directory is a little bit a 
special case. Most people use monotone to handle source trees, where you 
normally don't have so many unknown files.

Comments, arguments and corrections are very welcome, personal 
preferences somewhat less. ;-)

Regards

Markus


[1]: thread: listing unknown directories:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.monotone.devel/9345

[2]: thread: Dan's example for strange behavior of mtn add --unknown:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.monotone.devel/10651

[3]: a first patch by Ulf to change 'mtn add' to non-recursive.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.monotone.devel/8966

P.S.: looking at other VCSes, we see both: svn, hg, git and bzr add 
recursively, while cvs, darcs and cdv don't. I don't know about or 
haven't tested others.