Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: listing unknown directories

[Thomas Moschny]

On Thursday 30 November 2006 03:34, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> > I know that this is really different from current behavior, but it seems
> > to be much more natural. And more similar to what other commands do, e.g.
> > svn.
>
> This superficial difference from svn exactly reflects a deep
> difference from svn -- svn has no "whole tree" level, it always works
> on arbitrary subdirectories.  mtn is very very committed to having a
> "this is the whole tree, there is no other level" view of the world.

Sorry, but that's not true.

In Subversion, every revision is a snapshot of the whole tree.

The only difference is that you are allowed to checkout, work and commit on a 
subtree. But that's only convenience feature: By looking at the repository 
afterwards, you really can't tell whether someone worked with a checkout of 
the whole tree or a checkout of only a subtree; or if he did a commit in a 
subdirectory of his working copy (a "restricted" commit).

So, Subversion's facility of checking out partial trees has *nothing* to do 
with the fact that it restricts all commands per default to cwd, and really 
nothing to do with the fact that it emits all paths relative to cwd.

And after all, it was only an example. Like Zack said, mtn is different from 
many if not all unix commands wrt the discussed behavior.

[Btw, the next best tangential topic to be covered should now be really 
obvious :) ]

- Thomas

-- 
If you stand on your head, you will get footprints in your hair.