info and description

[Martin Pool]

On 04/01/2008, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
> my development format patch failed at pqm because:
>  - I hadn't updated the list of formats stuff for the info tests
>  - one of the info tests requires that there be only one format
> describing a given disk layout
>
> For the former, I don't understand why we have these massive long lists
> - e.g.
>    expected = 'development or development-subtree or ' \
>               'dirstate or dirstate-tags or pack-0.92 or'\
>               ' rich-root or rich-root-pack'
>
> For the latter, I can just remove the current development0 alias, though
> that seems less useful than having both the detailed form and the
> development current pointer. I'd rather change or remove
> bzrlib.tests.test_info.test_describe_tree_format because I don't think
> the policy really makes sense.

These annoy me too, both because they are longwinded and because it's
a poor description of the format.  I suspect some of these warts,
rather than the formats themselves, are what make people feel our
formats are unstable.

I think info should show the version of the repository, branch, and/or
tree, as they are versioned separately.  Just simply doing that might
be a worthwhile step, and would at least simplify the info tests.

However, those names don't correspond to anything the user can feed
back through the --format parameter, which only describes the overall
tuple.  At some point we may want to let people specify component
versions individually, and/or give short names to the component
formats.

So in summary - why not just print the repository format name there?

-- 
Martin