Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: listing unknown directories

[Thomas Moschny]

On Wednesday 29 November 2006 09:43, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 09:19:23AM +0100, Thomas Moschny wrote:
> > See
> > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.monotone.devel/7636
> > and around. He was arguing about confused users and about consistency. Me
> > personally, I was not convinced.
> >
> > Instead, I was confused when I had to learn that the paths monotone
> > /accepts/ (from the cmdline) have to be relative to cwd, while the paths
> > monotone /emits/ are always relative to the workspace root.
>
> So you argue that all paths monotone prints out, from all commands
> including e.g. 'status', should always be relative to the cwd?

Indeed, and additionally all the affected commands (status, diff, ls, ... but 
also commit) should be restricted to '.' (ie. the cwd) as long as the user 
doesn't explicitly requests something else.

I know that this is really different from current behavior, but it seems to be 
much more natural. And more similar to what other commands do, e.g. svn.

> Maybe the real problem is calling those commands "ls", which creates
> an expectation that they will work like, well, ls(1).

So you are saying that instead of meeting the user's expectation, we should 
rename those commands?

> (what exactly do 'ls branches', 'ls certs', 'ls epochs', and 'ls
> unknown' have to do with each other?).

That's a different issue, but I don't think that's a real one. At least the 
linux people are used to lsmod, lsdiff, lsusb, lsattr, lsof, etc.

> > Besides this, the zsh completion code could be less complex with relative
> > paths.
>
> Unless you want to use things like like automate get_revision or
> automate inventory, which certainly don't and won't use relative
> paths...

That's ok. It won't start parsing revisions or inventories as long as one can 
get simple file listings.

- Thomas