Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: listing unknown directories

[Derek Scherger]

Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> I see your point, but I am _really_ dubious about the idea that
> 'diff', 'status', and 'commit' should by default be restricted to the
> current directory.  Like, just speaking as a user, I suspect that
> would personally frustrate me :-).  Note also the desiderata that
> these commands should have identical processing of restrictions etc.,
> so that you can diff and status and then commit.
>
> Also, to just remind everyone who hasn't been lurking for the last n
> years, the other traditional argument for mtn commands being
> unrestricted by default is that in this model both common use cases
> are very natural:
>    current dir: mtn commit .
>   unrestricted: mtn commit
> but in the other model, one is not natural at all:
>    current dir: mtn commit
>   unrestricted: mtn commit ../../.. # or was that ../../../..? ../..?

When I originally wrote the restrictions code (unrecognizable from 
what's there today) it was relative to the current directory. The 
status, diff, commit and other commands operated as in option two above. 
The above argument was the winner at the time though and we changed it 
to work the way it does today.

3 or 4 years later, I'm still not convinced that what we have now is 
right though. I suspect that in this regard monotone is not only 
different from all unix commands but quite likely from all (or most) 
version control systems as well. At least sccs, rcs, subversion, cvs and 
perforce work this way iirc. I'm not sure about darcs, git, hg, etc. but 
I'm curious so if anyone knows off hand I'd be interested to know.

Another thought, to help clear up the ../../../.. (how many of these do 
I need again) case. Would it be useful to have some sort of 'mtn root' 
command that spits out the location of the workspace root perhaps in 
either --relative or --absolute path terms? Then something like cd $(mtn 
root) would be at least possible, if not still somewhat ugly.

Or, another option (pardon the pun) would be to have an --unrestricted 
or --all option to be used in place of some random number of ../../..'s 
i.e. 'mtn status' et. al. would be restricted to the current directory 
of the workspace while 'mtn status --unrestricted' would be unrestricted.

Cheers,
Derek