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

[graydon hoare]

Kevin Smith <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.

perhaps. the current log command just keeps going, writing log entries
as it finds them, breadth first, across the history frontier. but
there's an argument to be made that that behavior artificially
linearizes the view too much. maybe it should be an option, or perhaps
there's some sort of textual cue we can insert into a log entry
printout to let you know which part of the history path it came from.

> Since the 'log' command is taken for manifest use, my first thought
> is to name this new command 'history'.

I won't stop you from overloading the 'log' command a bit. there's an
obvious tradeoff for users between making one command do too many
things and making too many commands to remember. we need to play
around to find the balance.

> 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.

absolutely. sooner rather than later is the rule with anything
externally visible. we can optimize and extend a lot down the road,
but not change formats or UI so much.

-graydon