[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Setting tree revision for imported sources

[Stefan Monnier]

>> The way file moves are discovered by comparing the file list "before" and
>> "after": files present in both are easy.  All the files only present in
>> "after" are checked for "similarity" with all the files only present in
>> "before" to discover file moves, the rest is either added or deleted.
>> It works suprisingly well.
> That's exactly what `tla-update-ids' does, incidentally...

Indeed.

> So it looks like `mcvs grab' could be done in a 4 line shell script.

Quite possible.  Looking at the doc of tla-update-ids, the only difference
seems to be in the similarity algorithm (Meta-CVS tries to avoid the O(n^2)
behavior when there are many moved files: especially important when
directories are moved since Meta-CVS does not track directories at all and
consider it as a mass-move of files instead).

I think it would be great to incorporate such a feature in "tla" (maybe not
in the C code, but make it available as part of a basic install of tla).


        Stefan