Re: [Monotone-devel] Bug #21545 -- really annoying

[William Uther]

On 23/05/2008, at 5:55 PM, Richard Levitte wrote:

> In message <address@hidden> on  
> Fri, 23 May 2008 17:11:49 +1000, William Uther <address@hidden 
> > said:
>
> willu.mailingLists> > Good idea, I like it!  However, using
> willu.mailingLists> > directory_empty() can lead to confusion (': ; '
> willu.mailingLists> > is my prompt):
> willu.mailingLists>
> willu.mailingLists> Using ': ; ' as your prompt can lead to confusion
> willu.mailingLists> too. :)
>
> Hahaha...
>
> A true story:
> back in '94, when I worked at an ISP, my emacs session (running on
> SunOS 1.4.1) suddenly disappeared.  The reason?  Someone else had a
> promt looking like 'foobar> ' and had previously use emacs using the
> full path:
>
>  foobar> /usr/local/bin/emacs somefile
>
> He wanted to make it easy for himself (and he used csh, so history
> wasn't an easy thing for him), tripple-clicked on the line shown
> above, and pasted:
>
>  foobar> foobar> /usr/local/bin/emacs somefile
>  csh: foobar: command not found

Ouch!

> I thought about it, and thought; how do I prevent that kind of
> mistake, would I ever need to quickly cut'n'past a command line...

I have a two line prompt.  You can put useful information in it, and  
it doesn't
suffer from that issue:

address@hidden:~/src:Sat 24,  1:02pm]
%

The one problem it does have is that I find myself trimming those  
lines out when posting transcripts.


> willu.mailingLists> In the end I decided that a) people do not usually
> willu.mailingLists> add a directory with ignorable files in it and no
> willu.mailingLists> others, and b) it is slightly better to warn
> willu.mailingLists> slightly too much than slightly too little. :)  So
> willu.mailingLists> I left it simple and stupid.
>
> OK, I can follow that rationale.
>
> Now, considering we've just had discussions about rationales long
> forgotten, I suggest you document it in the manual or so.

Added a reference to KISS in the manual.  BTW, the "add" manual section
didn't even note that add was non-recursive by default, let alone the
rationale.  I gave the section a general cleanup.

Cheers,

Will        :-}