Re: Introducing 'unrecognized and 'ignored

[Eric S. Raymond]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>:
> > Then the problem of speeding up vc-dired-hook will reduce to a simpler
> > one -- how to make the individual directory-status commands in each
> > VCS return information for as many files as possible? Ideally, we want
> > them to return status on *all* files beneath the current directory.
> 
> I disagree.  VC should not do any tree traversal itself. 

There's no way to avoid this.

We have a choice between two different sets of circumstances under
which tree traversal will be needed:

1) We can take svn and later systems as a model.  Their status commands
recurse naturally, so none of those backend status commands has to traverse 
trees itself.  If we do this, the CVS and MCVS backend status commands have
to do tree traversal to match the behavior of the SVN and later ones.

2) We can take CVS as the model.  In that case we have to tell the backend 
status commands for later VCSes not to recurse -- and somewhere in the
upper-level calling logic for all backends, *it* has to recurse down
trees.

Right now VC is doing the first alternative.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>