[Monotone-devel] branch abbreviations

[Derek Scherger]

Fri Jun 15 14:46 < elb> boy, I would love some branch aliases
Fri Jun 15 14:47 < elb> so I could use, e.g., ipp to get
im.pidgin.pidgin, and ipp.whatever ot get im.pidgin.pidgin.whatever
Fri Jun 15 14:47 < elb> I have some branches under
net.elitists.elb.measurement.<category>.<project>, and it's killing me
Fri Jun 15 14:49 < oxygene> usenet style shortforms would be cool
Fri Jun 15 14:49 < oxygene> neem.foo.bar -> net.elitists.elb.etcpp
Fri Jun 15 14:50 < elb> I was thinking user-specified
Fri Jun 15 14:51 < elb> so, I could put an alias for 'meas' ->
'net.elitists.elb.measurement' in monotonerc
Fri Jun 15 14:51 < riz> that would be nice
Fri Jun 15 14:51 < elb> although automatic would be nice, too ;-)
Fri Jun 15 14:52 < elb> but neem is kind of dumb-looking ;-)
Fri Jun 15 14:55 -!- thm address@hidden has quit
[Remote host closed the connection]
Fri Jun 15 14:57 < r0nny> hmm - soundslike a perfect fit for a
per-database config
Fri Jun 15 15:01 < elb> I would much rather prefer it were in
monotonerc, actually
Fri Jun 15 15:01 < elb> well, I shouldn't say "much rather", but
"prefer", anyway

how about something like this:

address@hidden ~/monotone/mainline $ ./mtn heads -b .inventory
mtn: branch 'net.venge.monotone.basic_io.inventory' is currently merged:
b4787bd05558f1af4cd305637bc018dcee042b2e address@hidden
2007-05-21T21:06:35
address@hidden ~/monotone/mainline $ ./mtn heads -b .basic_io.inventory
mtn: branch 'net.venge.monotone.basic_io.inventory' is currently merged:
b4787bd05558f1af4cd305637bc018dcee042b2e address@hidden
2007-05-21T21:06:35

What this is doing is looking for a branch that matches the speficied
suffix (indicated by the preceeding "."). Of the ~200 branches in my
monotone database there are very few cases where the last component of
the branch name is not unique so this seems like a reasonable strategy.
It does totally assume that you have named your branches as suggested in
the monotone docs though so it may not help in all cases.

Thoughts? I have the basic patch working but need to update tests and
things. Do we want this on mainline?

Cheers,
Derek