Re: [Monotone-devel] status --brief

[Daniel Carosone]

On Sun, Oct 02, 2005 at 08:27:29PM -0700, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> Huh, interesting point.  Thanks for this feedback.  That does seem to
> make sense, the current branch is a basic part of a working copy's
> status...

This tells me "what might happen if I commit now?", which is fine.
There's also the question of "what might happen if I update now?"

There's no "-n update" or "--pretend update" or similar, that I've
noticed. Perhaps this is another form of:
 $ monotone diff -q -r <my baserev> -r <mythical head selector>

"Heads" warns me about whether I might have to do some merging, and
"the monotone way" is to commit local changes and merge before
updating, rather than after as in cvs, but it's still useful to get
information about what I'm about to get myself in for by starting this
process now.  Perhaps I can update safely to get a fix from someone
else before I'm ready to commit my changes.

If we imagine these two queries renamed as something like:
 $ monotone list uncomitted (or local_changes?)
 $ monotone list updates (or branch_changes, head_changes, ..?)

Then perhaps there's a case to be made for "monotone status" to show
me a condensed view of both sets: for each file, if it has local or
repository changes or both pending. There's probably something under
"automate inventory" that provides this info already..

Because branches are sticky, but revisions and tags and other checkout
selectors are not, "out of date with respect to the branch" is also an
important part of the status of a working directory.  Ideally,
"status" would consolidate and summarise (rather than concatenate)
information I can get from more specific commands.

> This may still be a bit much distracting info for the very common
> task of wanting a quick summary of "wait, what happened here
> again?"... could have an even briefer version that just has the last
> part, or another command ("changes" or something, maybe?) that just
> outputs the last part.

yeah, i think that's "list uncomitted".  Sometimes I just want to know
"will I lose anything if I blow away this old checkout?" (in which
case I should also "list unknown", hmm..)

Making this be a list subcommand also resolves the "no changes"
output; an empty list is quite meaningful, an empty status is
confusing.

--
Dan.

pgpUdxowUZx2f.pgp
Description: PGP signature