[Monotone-devel] 'monotone changes'

[Nathaniel Smith]

[intentionally breaking threading from address@hidden

On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 04:09:57AM -0500, graydon hoare wrote:
> let's just 
> focus on real bugs and easily-agreed-on improvements for a while.

Hear hear!  (I also hearby apologize for any bitchiness I was
responsible for; I'm sure there's at least some in all of those 90+
messages...)

Here's a proposal for such an improvement: one thing the discussion
made very clear is that people want a way to say 'diff <parent>
<revision>'.  This is a really, really common, semantically atomic
action -- "what happened there?" and probably covers ~90% of the
uses of the more complicated selector changes (while remaining
completely and utterly agnostic on them).

So, I propose a new command 'monotone changes <id>', to print
something like

# Changes in 03a7939b9d9d9b392eb1916bb473703e5f0674c9:
#
# new_manifest [193419badef7fc26f95aa57072605e9ecb972d1b]
# 
# Changes versus parent revision
#    3d911390f293fe391f6a78d7df8b61e732fbcec1:
<output of 'monotone diff 3d91... 03a7...'>
<repeat if there are multiple parents>

Exact format to be determined; there should probably be more of a
break between the stuff describing each parent, to make it easier to
split into valid patches and to scroll/search through.

Actually, I guess there's not a whole lot to discuss here; I'd just
add this command, except I'm going to bed now, and reading this email
tomorrow will remind me about it :-).

The main concern is something like "oh no, having too many commands is
confusing" (perhaps with an implicit "like Arch!" tacked on).  But I
don't think that applies here; it really is a very very common
command, with a natural semantics.  Besides, it really doesn't
matter anyway whether you use this or diff, and that's obvious, so
there shouldn't be any confusion about "which should I use?".
And this one should definitely improve the user experience
immediately.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
The Universe may  /  Be as large as they say
But it wouldn't be missed  /  If it didn't exist.
  -- Piet Hein