Re: [Monotone-devel] branch abbreviations

[Daniel Carosone]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 10:58:17PM -0600, Derek Scherger wrote:
> how about something like this:
> 
> address@hidden ~/monotone/mainline $ ./mtn heads -b .inventory
> mtn: branch 'net.venge.monotone.basic_io.inventory' is currently merged:
> b4787bd05558f1af4cd305637bc018dcee042b2e address@hidden
> 2007-05-21T21:06:35
> address@hidden ~/monotone/mainline $ ./mtn heads -b .basic_io.inventory
> mtn: branch 'net.venge.monotone.basic_io.inventory' is currently merged:
> b4787bd05558f1af4cd305637bc018dcee042b2e address@hidden
> 2007-05-21T21:06:35
> 
> What this is doing is looking for a branch that matches the speficied
> suffix (indicated by the preceeding "."). Of the ~200 branches in my
> monotone database there are very few cases where the last component of
> the branch name is not unique so this seems like a reasonable strategy.

I like the basic idea, but I have some stylistic nits about the syntax.

The .foo.bar form reminds me more of a relative path; so if I was in a
workspace with a "default branch" (via _MTN/options or hook) then I
think I'd expect this kind of branch name be appended to the base.  

I would think something like *.foo.bar would go matching elsewhere in
the branch namespace. 

Maybe this even leaves room for some kind of .. syntax that strips
elements off the base, but, uhh, I'm not going to try and make up an
example right now. :)

Anyway, as you say, I think for mainline this probably encodes too
much naming-convention practice into the tool while that issue is
still generally in flux.

--
Dan.

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