[Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...

[Nathaniel Smith]

So, one issue that came up in the discussion last week about renaming
the monotone executable was what to do with the bookkeeping directory:
  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.monotone.devel/6160
Only a few people replied, and this is something that seems to incite
discussion more than any other naming-related issue (except for the
executable name being too long) -- e.g., this has come up over with
the darcs crowd repeatedly (see most recently http://bugs.darcs.net/issue129),
svn has a special hack to let you change, etc.  So, since 0.26 isn't
coming out for at least a week anyway (stupid end-of-term), I'd sort
of like to hear more opinions on this, to get a sense of the community
feeling...

The essence is: do we want the bookkeeping dir to something like:
  _MTN
  _mtn
  .MTN \__ If one of these names, also specify what the configuration
  .mtn /   dir in ~ should be called
  .MTN-bookkeeping \__ or other less stupid suffixes accepted
  .mtn-bookkeeping /   too

I guess there are probably other options, but I can't think of any.

ALSO: please state not just what you _prefer_, but what you would
consider _annoying_.  Or even _just_ what you would find annoying,
because really, this is a stupid little point where about the best we
can hope for is to minimize offensiveness.

As a quick reminder, main arguments for underscores I know:
  -- it's an easy way to see "in your peripheral vision" that a dir is
     under monotone
  -- umm... VMS compatibility ;-)
Main arguments for leading dots:
  -- I guess some people find the presence of a bookkeeping dir at the
     top level distracting?
Main arguments commonly encountered when discussing other systems (or
that might unconsciously influence intuitions), that don't apply:
  -- CVS dirs are totally obnoxious
     -- yes, but that's partly because they're scattered all over the
        tree, so the conclusion doesn't _fully_ carry over
  -- One shouldn't hide huge space-filling files inside a . dir
     -- monotone is one of the few DVCSes that doesn't, so never mind
        -- well, though, I guess I could imagine 

Cheers,
-- Nathaniel

-- 
"If you can explain how you do something, then you're very very bad at it."
  -- John Hopfield