Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Re: [OFFTOPIC] News and Outlook on guitone

[Timothy Brownawell]

On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 14:14 +0900, Boris wrote:
> On Fri, 08 Jun 2007 13:50:44 +0900, Timothy Brownawell  
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 13:33 +0900, Boris wrote:
> >> On Fri, 08 Jun 2007 00:42:55 +0900, Thomas Keller <address@hidden>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> > n the other hand I kind of refuse to use mtn directly (without
> >> > automate), because I'd have to start another process which works on  
> >> the
> >> > same database / workspace for that each time,
> >>
> >> It's even more offtopic but: How do you use mtn automate *without*
> >> restarting a process? Let's say I want to get heads and branches: I have
> >> to start two processes currently with "mtn automate heads" and "mtn
> >> automate branches". I tried "mtn automate" thinking that I can use then
> >> monotone like a shell and enter commands like "heads" and "branches"  
> >> only
> >> but this doesn't work (at least not with version 0.32 under Cygwin)?
> >
> > You use "mtn automate stdio", and talk to it in the format described at
> > http://monotone.ca/docs/Automation.html#index-mtn-automate-stdio-156
> 
> Thanks! Out of curiosity: Why this cryptic input format if it's all so  
> user-friendly with command line options?

It's designed for use by other programs. So instead of friendly
whitespace-delimited tokens and quoting and escape characters and such,
it uses length-prefixed strings and generally cares more about being
easy to interface with correctly than about being pretty and easy to
type.

It allows for options because that means that commands that need options
(like "diff" / "automate content_diff") can use the same machinery
regardless of how they're called.


-- 
Timothy

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