Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Dumb Question

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 09:38:58PM +0200, Koen Kooi wrote:
> Timothy Brownawell schreef:
> > On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 12:20 -0700, Rob Schoening wrote:
> >> Is there a recommended way to roll a particular file or files back to
> >> a particular revision?  "mtn update" affects the entire workspace,
> >> which I don't want.  Obviously "mtn cat -r revision foo.txt >foo.txt "
> >> will work, but this seems wrong. 
> >>  
> >> Is it?  Or is there a better way?
> > 
> > No, that's the right (only) way. What seems wrong about it?
> 
> monotone update <file> -r<rev> would seem a bit more logical.

A workspace is a revision-in-progress.  A revision is a tree, plus a
location in the history graph.  In practice, one expresses this
location by naming the revision's parent(s).

Workspace commands ('add', 'rename', 'attr set', 'revert', modifying
files...) are how you modify the tree part of this
revision-in-progress.

'update' is how you modify the location part of this revision in
progress.  It picks up your little stubby side-branch, and moves it to
another place in the revision graph.

Other VCSes have historically overloaded the 'update' command, so it
performed a bunch of logically unrelated functions -- moving your
work in progress, doing merges, reverting files, you name it... it
strikes me as entirely wrongheaded UI, though, that just makes things
more confusing and less predictable.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
"The problem...is that sets have a very limited range of
activities -- they can't carry pianos, for example, nor drink
beer."