[Monotone-devel] Re: Cherry-Picking, Renames, Etc.

[Bruce Stephens]

Oren Ben-Kiki <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

>> > File renames are by far the most annoying part of having to deal
>> > with a version control system.
>
>> Is that in fact so annoying?
>
> Definitely. You can't do "monotone move" in a GUI - some people
> actually do use GUIs to manage their directory trees... And if you
> do a "big" reorganization of your code, having to report each change
> by hand to the version control system gets old very fast. And so
> on. Besides, it is like having to apply a choke when starting a car
> on a cold day, it practically screams for automation.

If you wanted to move lots of files around, and used some kind of GUI
to do it, then I guess it would be annoying.  But how often does that
happen?  Maybe most of us are just too used to cvs, but I don't see
much evidence that people do lots of renaming even when they can (for
example, I looked at some of the patchsets from Linux once, to see how
file renames were expressed, and I had to look at quite a few before I
found a rename).

Anyway, it seems fairly clear that this can be layered on to any
version control system that supports renaming.  If you want to use
file ids, then use them, and just before committing, rescan your tree
and issue the appropriate "tla mv", "monotone rename" or whatever
commands.  You can either store the manifest file (the thing mapping
between stable file ids and filenames) or generate it after checking
out.  Similarly, you can use other heuristics if you think they're
appropriate for your project.  For convenience, you'd want a little
scriptability in the version control tool, but that doesn't seem hard
to add.

That seems to me to be a better implementation for Arch, too.  Right
now, if you want something equivalent to what every other version
control system has (in Arch terms, explicit) you need to have a
separate id file for every file and directory.  Nothing wrong with
that as an option, but it seems unnecessarily clumsy.