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

[Larry Hastings]

Nathaniel Smith wrote:

So, since 0.26 isn't coming out for at least a week anyway (stupid end-of-term),

0.26 is coming out that soon?  I figured it was months away.  Rock on!

I'd sort of like to hear more opinions on this, to get a sense of the community feeling...
  

As a Windows guy, it doesn't make any difference to me.  If I get tired of looking at the directory I can always set the "hidden" bit.  I suppose I would find a lengthy name like .MTN-bookkeeping-directory-nobudy-cumz-in-here-sekrit tiresome.

I take it the leading underscore is to help with sorting order?  I find that a bit strange, as it would sort to the middle, between the upper- and lower-case characters.  Though I guess it's preferable to sorting to the middle of the upper-case letters, as M does.  Still, ever the iconoclast, how about a plus-sign, as in +MTN?  That would sort it to the head of the directory every time, and it's not a special character to any shell I know of.  (And, yes, I genuinely expect that suggestion to go exactly nowhere.)


I've stood near a VMS system on several occasions, and even looked at the chassis of one once while a coworker pointed at it.  I am ambivalent on whether monotone should limit its options in order to accomodate VMS's antiquated filesystem semantics.  After all, and please correct me if I'm wrong, I understand that VMS has been on its way out for years.  (Truthfully, I'm surprised that folks are using bleeding-edge software like monotone on something as, well, non-bleeding-edge as VMS.)

One possible solution would be a mtn command that prints the basename of the bookkeeping directory on the local computer, so that scripts can ask for it by name.  Thus a well-written script could run unmodified on VMS.  A poorly-written script could get diffs from people who care ;)

Cheers,


larry