Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: mtn add weirdness

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 08:13 -0700, Justin Patrin wrote:

> This is a good point. Directories are being treated the same way as
> files, e.g. you have to specify them when using restrictions in order
> to commit them. But if you specify a directory everything inside of it
> also gets selected. I'm not saying this shouldn't happen, just that
> directories are different than files and that it's a reason *for*
> auto-comitting parent directories when comitting a file.

Here is another reason: it is impossible to commit files.

What is really being committed is a *binding* from a name (a
project-relative path) to a state (the new content). The current
behavior is effectively refusing to form the name that must be bound. In
principle, there exists no sensible formulation of a (name, state) pair
that omits any portion of the path leading up to the file name.

Since (a) there is no sensible semantics for the current behavior, and
(b) the full project-relative path must necessarily be formed in order
to commit, there can be (in principle) no conflict of sensible behavior
that would arise from implicitly adding missing directories in the
relative path.

And obviously, it would improve ease-of-use.

shap