Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Scalability question

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Fri, 2006-08-04 at 22:06 +0200, Thomas Moschny wrote:

> The confusing thing about this is that paths provided by the user on the 
> command line always have to be relative to the current working directory, 
> while the paths emitted as the result of mtn commands (i.e. presented to the 
> user) are relative to the root of the working directory.

Yes. OpenCM users found this initially confusing as well.

We played with creating a user-selectable output option at one point,
but the result of that was even more confusing in practice. This would
be true for mtn as well.

The problem is that certain commands must answer questions about the
whole project. For example, the "mtn status" command gives status for
every file in the project. If this output was PWD-relative, you would
get things like:

  [M]  fred.c
  [D]  ../baz/mumble.c

which would be confusing. Worse, the answer differs depending on your
current directory, which was really confusing.

Hypothetically, it would be possible to divide mtn commands into
"project queries" and "workspace queries" and use different output
styles for these. This would be even *more* confusing.

This is one of those cases where there is going to be confusion no
matter what you do, and the monotone/OpenCM decision at least gives
consistency.


shap