Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: [Monotone-commits-diffs] Revision c6569e455defcd6b0d889edcff0bb0fe6180a376

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 07:09:12AM +0200, Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:
> In message <address@hidden> on Wed, 31 Aug 2005 21:27:27 -0700, Nathaniel 
> Smith <address@hidden> said:
> Really?  I don't agree, but maybe it's old 'cvs import' fostering that
> affects me.  As far as I can tell, 'setup' is there to create new
> projects, while (in my opinion) import should import a new snapshot of
> something to a potentially existing branch, taking into account things
> like files that have disappeared since last snapshot (and should
> therefore be dropped).  See contrib/monotone-import.pl.

Hmm, my knowledge of "cvs import" (and I'm guessing I'm not alone
here?) is that "cvs import is for creating new projects". :-)

> njs> In paricular, the problem is that people keep thinking that if
> njs> they want to start working on an existing project, they should do
> njs> "setup; checkout".
> 
> Huh???  Why do people think they should setup for an existing project?
> I'm a bit baffled here.  And I'm a bit baffled that I haven't heard of
> similar problems with other SCMs with similar functionality...

Well, they want the directory foo/ to be a working directory for
working on the UltraFoo9000.  So they have to set it up as a working
directory, and then put the code they want to work on into it, right?

> njs> It would be handy to have a "import" command that did the
> njs> equivalent of "setup && add .".
> 
> As already pointed out above, 'add .' isn't enough.

It is if 'import' is for importing projects to source control, and the
previous revision is by definition null.

For the (almost unrelated and much less central?) use case of checking
in a snapshot of some other source as a child of another revision, it
seems like we should just have:
 $ monotone co -r $OLDREV
 $ <drop new stuff on top>
 $ monotone drop --missing
 $ monotone add --new
 $ monotone commit
or so -- the point being that we should have some convenient way to
issue the relevant add/drop commands, which is generally useful (e.g.,
the options above, or mercurial has a special command 'addremove', I
believe), but since that's _all_ that's special about importing
external snapshots, there shouldn't be any specially named command for
doing so...?

-- Nathaniel

-- 
"The problem...is that sets have a very limited range of
activities -- they can't carry pianos, for example, nor drink
beer."