Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Cherry-Picking, Renames, Etc.

[Oren Ben-Kiki]

On Monday 29 November 2004 20:57, Bruce Stephens wrote:
> > Because I'd need a separate "infrastructure" (config files, paths,
> > environment variables...).
>
> What does it need to know?  You run it in the top level of a project,
> and it looks at the files underneath.  Oh, I guess it might want to
> know about ignorable files (which is configurable).  And it would
> need to know the path of monotone, I suppose.  OK.  But for a
> prototype (to see whether the idea actually makes a significant
> difference) you could hack something that worked for you (and would
> work for other people with minor modifications), I'd have thought.

For a prototype, sure; the best way to go about this would be to write a 
"my-monotone-guess" script, debug & test it thoroughly as a standalone 
tool, and then consider if/how to integrate it with monotone. Of course 
my first choice would be to write in in Perl, not C++. Hmmm... doing it 
in C++... Suddenly, having separate config files etc. doesn't look much 
more attractive :-)

> ... I'm just surprised that they don't separate
> out the thing in the way I suggested, and then you can make the
> common cases easy in a clean way.  However, I've never written a
> version control system, so it's quite possible I'm missing some
> difficulty.

Well, what happens if I create a "prepare" file, then I do something to 
the file system that invalidates it? Or run a monotone command - which 
monotone commands are safe to run without invalidating the file? Can I 
have more than one "prepare" file at the same time? Nothing that can't 
be solved, but it could get tricky, and it would certainly complicate 
the system. At this stage, I think Graydon is right in not going down 
this road. Besides, I never did believe much in the need for partial 
commits :-)

Have fun,

 Oren Ben-Kiki