Re: [Monotone-devel] [PATCH] parent selector 'p:xxx'

[Ralf S. Engelschall]

On Sat, Oct 06, 2007, Nathaniel Smith wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 07:09:03PM +0200, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:
> > So, find appended a small patch against h:n.v.m which implements a
> > "p:<rev>" selector. With this I now can finally use short commands like:
> >
> >     $ mtn diff -r p:<rev> -r <rev>
> >
> > The <rev> here can be an appreviated revision, too.
>
> The patch contains no tests, though otherwise looks reasonable enough.

Ok, I'll add some tests.

> What happens if <rev> is a root revision?

Nothing spectacular: the selector just returns no revisions at all. This
situation is already gracefully handled by the code around my patched
lines.

> "Show me stuff about revision <blah>" seems like a pretty fundamental
> command -- "stuff" presumably including some metadata summary like log
> gives you, and also a diff or so.  Does anyone have a good idea for
> what this command would be called?  It would be pretty easy to add,
> and might solve your particular problem in a nicer way.  (Also the
> commit notification problem that Matthew was fighting with, etc.)

Yes, such a command is such good that I recently even tried to implement
it in Lua with the help of mtn_automate() -- I just failed because
of a bug in mtn_automate() which I reported recently, too. The name
for the command would be "mtn changeset" or in short "mtn cs". The
output I expect is actually is more or less really the same as what "mtn
log --diffs --no-graph --from <rev> --to <rev>" currently gives us: a
summary information about a changeset. So, I personally would prefer
that we both provide the generic selector p:<rev> (as it can be useful
for others commands beside "mtn diff", too) and also implement a "mtn cs
<rev>" command which produces the output of "mtn log --diffs --no-graph
--from <rev> --to <rev>" plus perhaps even more if available.

                                       Ralf S. Engelschall
                                       address@hidden
                                       www.engelschall.com