[Monotone-devel] File log command-line UI thoughts

[Kevin Smith]

As you know, I am interested in a command that will list the history of 
a single file. Since I come from a world with essentially no branches, 
it has been an interesting exercise for me to blend my concept of a 
linear history with the world of monotone branching.

I think the sane thing to do is to allow you to pull the history for a 
given file back to the first point that it had two ancestors. At that 
point, it would stop and tell you the ids of the two ancestors.

From there, you would have to run another command to ask for the 
history of the ancestor you wish to follow, which would show you that 
history back to the merge before that. In a GUI, this could be bundled 
in a friendly way.

Since the 'log' command is taken for manifest use, my first thought is 
to name this new command 'history'. Other options would be extending the 
log command to handle files, or naming it 'filelog'. Regardless of the 
name, the command might look like:

  history <filename>
  history <file-id>

As with filediff, we have ambiguity here. Perhaps the universal rule 
should be that if a parameter can be a filename or file-id, it should 
first look for a local file in the workspace by that name, and if there 
isn't one, it should assume it is a file-id? Or should we look for a 
unique completion first, then default to an existing filename, and 
finally fall back to showing a list of possible completions?

Or should we require all id's to be prefixed with 'revision', as in:

  history revision 23c3

That seems like needless typing, to me. It would be great to be 
consistent across all commands, but that might mean tweaking the 
existing commands, which I know might be painful. Less painful now than 
after v1.0, of course.

Thoughts?

Kevin