Re: [Monotone-devel] status --brief

[Chad Walstrom]

Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden>  wrote:
> Ah, okay, actually I think that particular thing is a bug in --brief
> -- IMO it should print "no changes" if there are no changes, similar
> to what 'monotone diff' does.

Hmm...  It all depends upon which philosophies you follow for UI
design.  Are you trying to follow UNIX design philosophy, "succeed
silently" or the Windows philosophy, more of a "succeed or fail, just
do it loudly."

"no changes" would be an example of succeeding loudly. ;-)

> Does that change your opinion either way?

Because monotone status always returns zero (0), having "no changes"
for an output is probably the only way to get meaning out of the
command for use in scripts, although the lack of output has meaning in
and of itself.  Instead of outputting "no changes", I would like to
see some thought given to the return values for monotone.

I'm partial to brief/quiet modes as a default setting and using
verbose modes as an option.  Perhaps provide a global lua hook to
specify the default in monotonerc?