bzr commands taking a filename

[John A Meinel]

Matthieu Moy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I got a surprising behavior with "bzr log" with a filename argument:
> when called from a subdirectory of the tree root, a relative filename
> still has to be given relative to the root.
> 
> Actually, I think this is more general about any command taking a
> filename as argument (I already filled a bug for "ignore").
> 
> (and in the case of "bzr log", there should also be a warning or even
> an error when an inexistant filename is provided as argument).
> 

I'm surprised bzr log works that way. I thought I've done it correctly 
in the past. It should be a simple bugfix.

"bzr ignore" is a different issue, though. Because I believe you can use 
a wildcard to tell it to ignore a class of objects.

I have a project which uses configure to automatically generate all 
Makefiles, so I added the line "Makefile" to .bzrignore. So that any 
Makefile in the project is ignored.

However, this may or may not be what we want for the command "bzr ignore".

When you type that command, are you always stating "I specifically want 
to ignore *this* file, and *this* file only", or are you sometimes 
stating "I want to ignore files with this name"

I would be okay with saying "If you use bzr ignore, you are giving exact 
files to be ignored, not wildcard matches". (Perhaps with an option to 
change that).

You could also try a little bit of heuristics. If you have a slash in 
the filename, then you obviously want an exact path, even though you may 
be in a subdirectory right now. (But that fails when you are ignoring a 
file in the current directory, which is part of the problem).

John
=:->