[Monotone-devel] new include/exclude commands?

[Derek Scherger]

I had an idea the other day, where I was continually having to provide a bunch of --exclude optons in a workspace with some (intentionally) missing files, that it might be useful to be able to specify a set of includes or excludes that persist across several commands. This would avoid the need to repeatedly specify the set of paths to include or exclude. It turns out to be very simple to implement and I have a the basics working so I thought I'd check and see if people would generally find this good, bad or ugly.

The basic idea is:

$ mtn include aaa bbb ccc
$ mtn exclude ddd eee fff
$ mtn status
Including:
  aaa
  bbb
  ccc
Excluding:
  ddd
  eee
  fff
Current branch: ...
Changes against parent ...

This is exactly equivalent to saying 'mtn status aaa bbb ccc --exclude ddd --exclude eee --exclude fff' with current monotone.

At the moment, saying 'mtn include' or 'mtn exclude' with no arguments clears the associated list of paths. Repeated 'mtn include' or 'mtn exclude' commands with paths simply append more paths to the include or exclude list. With a bit more work this could lead quite easily to the idea of a partial checkout, where lots of things are missing, but listed as excluded. Again, whether this is generally useful or not is probably debatable.

Comments?

Cheers,
Derek