[Monotone-devel] monotone's automation interface

[Glen Ditchfield]

I had a few thoughts after writing my maildir assistant script.

* "monotone automate inventory" is a pretty blunt tool for finding missing, 
unknown, and ignored files, since (in Monotone 0.25) it produces a line for 
every file in the working copy.  In my case, that's 16,000 lines to sort 
through when I'm only interested in tracking down roughly a dozen mail files 
that have been moved, renamed, or deleted.  It would help somewhat if the 
inventory command took a directory name as an argument, and only printed an 
inventory of files in that directory; then I could execute "monotone automate 
inventory Mail", but I would still have 8,500 lines to process.

* The script executes one "monotone rename" or "monotone drop" command for 
each missing message.  If "monotone automate" is supposed to be the preferred 
scripting interface, then there ought to be a way to feed drop and rename 
commands to "monotone automate stdio".

* I don't know whether the script is portable to Windows, let alone VMS.

So, I started day-dreaming.  What if monotone extended its Lua interpreter 
with a monotone library?  There could be functions like mtn.rename(path), and 
iterators like mtn.inventory().  What if the command "monotone mtn-mail" 
caused monotone to look for a Lua script named "mtn-mail" and execute it with 
the extended interpreter?