Re: [Monotone-devel] New branch name with no other changes

[Nuno Lucas]

Hello,

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 00:14, Stephen Leake
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hendrik Boom <address@hidden> writes:
>> So my real problem was not knowing about the approve command.  I may
>> have heard about it before, but if I did assumed it was for reporting on
>> the success of testing, rather than providing a branch name.
>
> Hmm. I would have thought so, too. But that's not what the manual says
> (http://www.monotone.ca/docs/Review.html#Review); it seems 'approve' is
> a synonym for the 'cert' command I use for creating a new branch.
>
> I guess it makes sense when compared to 'disapprove', but it sounds odd
> in my (our) work flow.
>
> 'testresult' is for recording the results of testing.

In my view, any of those commands do what one wants when creating a
fork, but none is clear on what it does.

I would vote for a "mtn fork <new_branch_name>" command. If no options
given would create a new branch on the current workspace revision.
No workspace update would be done by default, but could be done by
adding "--update" (or "-u").
Other option would be "-r <revision>", so one could fork from a
specific revision independently of the current workspace.
A third, arguable, option could be if the commit is "real" (cert) or
"virtual" (just changes the "_MTN/options" file). It could be a
"--delayed" or "--local" option. But I don't have strong feelings
about this one.

I don't have a very strong reason to add this command. But I find that
I create a new branch rarely enough that I always have to go see the
manual on how to do it. And doing it at commit time is too late in the
game -- most of the time I have to undo that commit because I forgot
to branch.

The decision to branch is done mostly a long time before the real
commit, so there is a good chance to forget about it at commit time.
Doing "dummy" commits or manually editing the _MTN/options file feels "dirty".

Well, this is just to give an user opinion (using monotone since 0.20
something). Feel free to disregard.


Best Regards,
~Nuno Lucas

> --
> -- Stephe