FEATURE REQ: group common commands under 'ls' instead of separate commands
Martin Pool
martinpool at gmail.com
Thu Sep 15 13:26:02 BST 2005
On 13/09/05, John Yates <jyates at netezza.com> wrote:
> Let me suggest that this thread really amounts to an argument about the
> useful or basis set of queries that we want to support against a database
> and the formatting of the results. The state of the DRCS and a user's
> working storage constitute the "database". Every non-destructive bzr
> command is merely a query is disguise. The many issues around specifying
> revisions (which has at times consumed this list) in database terminology
> are merely varying query restrictions.
Right; though at the same time we need to recognize that "oh, it's
just a database" is a level of understanding that should be optional.
Novice users should be able to treat it just like cvs: diff, commit,
update, merge.
> ClearCase's ClearTool definitely exemplified this design perspective.
> ClearCase documentation describes both a "query language" and a "report
> writing" capability. In reality these features are nothing more than
> subsets of the command-line syntax. Instead of the SQL's SELECT verb
> ClearCase uses DESCRIBE and FIND. Report writing is a fancy name for
> a format string introduce by a -fmt option. The string can include
> tokens to specify rendering various attributes of the entities selected
> by the query.
>
> It has been years since I used ClearCase. Still I remember fondly
> composing queries that generated sequences of commands that I could
> redirect to a file and execute without any further editing.
Yes, I also used it a few years ago and was pleased by the database
and unixy aspects of it (and less pleased by other things.)
I think it would be great if we had a find command that could track
down revisions or files as you can do with cleartool. ls is a small
step towards that, an alias for "find, in the working directory, all
files modified since the current head revision."
--
Martin
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