Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: listing unknown directories

[Zack Weinberg]

On 11/29/06, Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 03:10:02AM +0100, Thomas Moschny wrote:
> > I know that this is really different from current behavior, but it seems to be
> > much more natural. And more similar to what other commands do, e.g. svn.
>
> This superficial difference from svn exactly reflects a deep
> difference from svn -- svn has no "whole tree" level, it always works
> on arbitrary subdirectories.  mtn is very very committed to having a
> "this is the whole tree, there is no other level" view of the world.
>
> > > Maybe the real problem is calling those commands "ls", which creates
> > > an expectation that they will work like, well, ls(1).
> >
> > So you are saying that instead of meeting the user's expectation, we should
> > rename those commands?
>
> Yes.  This will give the user different expectations, ones that they
> may like just as well, and that are easier for us to meet.

I see what you're saying, Nathaniel, but I have to come down on
Thomas's side here, because this *isn't* a mtn vs. svn issue.  It's a
mtn versus *every other Unix command* issue.   If we make mtn commands
in general operate on their subdirectory and print paths relative to
the original cwd, that's going to make using it from shell scripts
much easier, no matter how we decide to spell "ls unknown".  Read back
upthread about how people were complaining about not being able to do
"mtn ls ignored  | xargs rm" from a subdirectory.

[ To preserve the mtn model I could support causing "mtn commit" to
error out if invoked from a subdirectory, although I think there are
project tree layouts for which that could be incredibly annoying. ]

zw