[Monotone-devel] Adding a keyword certificate

[Julio M. Merino Vidal]

Hi all,

One of the things I liked when I was trying to learn Arch (something that
I haven't still achieved) was its support to attach keywords to a revision.
AFAIK, they are quite useless ATM but it seems to me that they have great
potential, specially for project leaders.

For example, a developer could choose to classify revisions as 'bugfix',
'indentation', 'improvement', etc.  Then he could use a command to search
for all revisions matching a criteria, like:
- Search all "bugfix" releases to verify they are present in the stable
  branch.
- Search all "improvement" releases between two versions to see what new
  features are in the program (i.e., to write a complete NEWS entry).
- Anything else you can think about ;)

I think it could be nice to have this in monotone. So I've locally added
basic support for this, which has been really easy:
- Add a command, named "keyword", that adds a keyword certificate to a
  given revision.  (The name may not be very fortunate since it's not
  a verb... but well.)  This is very similar to 'comment'.
- Add support for a 'k:<something>' selector that matches revisions based
  on their keyword certificates.
- Make the 'log' command show keywords attached to revisions.

Do you think this is interesting and worth adding?

Now, I'm looking for a way to search for these revisions.  The 'complete
revision' command seems to be what I'm looking for, but it doesn't work
with selectors.  Should it?  If not, we could add a 'search' command that,
given a selector, shows all matching revisions in a friendly format
(similar to 'log').

What about this?

Thanks!

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <address@hidden>
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jmmv/
The NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/