Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: mtn add weirdness

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 02:09:32AM +0200, Koen Kooi wrote:
> Nathaniel Smith schreef:
> > So, umm... you did in fact tell monotone to commit just the addition
> > of the .bb file, and not the addition of the directory containing it.
> > For obvious (I think?) reasons, that Just Can't Be Done :-).
> 
> Can you say 'broken behaviour'?

It's not broken behavior; it's different understandings of what
happened.  Now, one behavior is probably better, but sarcastic
comments probably aren't going to help us reach consensus on which,
either...

To be clear -- the reason it works the way it does is that you added
two files.  Then, by using a restriction, you told monotone to commit
just one of them and not the other.  Since it is not possible to do
that, monotone complained, and the solution is to simply tell monotone
that, oh, actually, I do want to commit both of those files, not just
one of them.

Possibly an exception should be made to these rules where
dependencies are involved; dunno.  See below.

> > Would a different error message have made this more clear?  Is there
> > some other behavior you would have preferred?
> 
> I think the preferred behaviour is obvious: the file and its
> 'dependencies' are committed to the db.
> If that really can't be done, I'd like to have a big fat note on the
> monotone site were I can point our poor developers to, so I don't have
> to spend too much time listining to "monotone sucks, you should use git"
> complaints....

What should this note say?  "WARNING: If you add a directory and a
file inside that directory, and then try to commit just the file, then
monotone will complain that it can't commit only the file but not the
directory, and you should re-run the command specifying that you do
want to commit the directory."?  If that's the message, then if you
have to go to the web site to understand, that's a bug -- the error
message should be making it clear.

Regarding the idea of automatically including dependencies, what do
you think about the case:
  $ mtn drop bar
  $ mtn rename foo bar
  $ mtn commit foo
Should monotone automatically commit the deletion of "bar"?  It can't
commit the rename otherwise.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
Details are all that matters; God dwells there, and you never get to
see Him if you don't struggle to get them right. -- Stephen Jay Gould