[Monotone-devel] Automation Status & Improvements

[Thomas Keller]

Hey all!

This goes especially to all the guys (tbrownaw, dscherger, anybody 
else?) who're currently working on improvements / additions in the 
automation interface.

At first (also in regard of my previous email about "Project 
Management") I'd like to know: What is the exact status of all your 
efforts? As far as I followed IRC and mailing list, particularily

a) automate inventory (dscherger)? Derek, you're probably waiting for 
workspace-merge for final tweaks? Also, have you decided to change 
anything else with the current basic_io formatted output which was 
discussed [0]?

b) automate stdio (tbrownaw)? Timothy, I know you're also pretty busy 
with the Lua Tester part (and maybe other things as well), but your 
recent mail "Extending 'automate stdio'" looks promising also solving 
input issues for not-yet automated commands like "commit" which would 
need to be able to read a log message from stdin...

Is the proposal by Timothy accepted by the other developers? The thread 
wasn't too active (in comparison to others), still, to be able to make 
the automation interface really complete, this is a needed precondition 
for further expansions.

Also, in general, Marcel van der Bloom, posted in June already an 
interesting note in the wiki [1] concerning the future development of 
the normal command line interface and the automation interface (which 
are always out of sync, also of course for usability reasons).

Some time ago I also wrote in our wiki [2] that a complete automation 
interface could make the actual cmdline binary mtn a thin client for a 
mtn-core binary which would basically talk with mtn via automate stdio, 
and thus would serve as *one* possible "frontend" for monotone (beside 
graphical frontends which would then directly talk to mtn-core).

Obviously I don't think that this dream comes true (anytime), Ingo and 
me finally decided to start on our own regarding further extensions on 
the automation interface, since, yeah, if you don't do it yourself, it 
won't happen.
We have quite a *long* list of needed expansions for the automation 
interface, since everything which exists as command for mtn but not for 
mtn automate (and is plain-dead needed for a successful GUI) is 
practically a blocker for our project guitone [3].

The first extension in this regard is a basic_io formatted "attributes" 
command. I recently stumbled across "automate attributes" [4] (which was 
not documented other than mtn automate --help) while I filed a bug for 
problems with get_manifest_of and get_revision, but closer examination 
showed me that it did't exactly fit our needs, so we picked that as our 
first "project" (branch will be nvm.basic_io.attributes), also, because 
this should be a "slight" entry into the automation programming since 
the current command only needs to be expanded.

Thanks for reading so far,
Thomas.

[0] http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_log/monotone?date=2006-07-04#l78
[1] http://venge.net/monotone/wiki/AutomateWishlist
[2] 
http://guitone.berlios.de/wiki/index.php/Proposed_extensions_to_mtn_automate_interface
[3] http://guitone.berlios.de
[4] https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=17077