"bzr mv considered harmful" or "IDE != command-line"

[Andrew Cowie]

On Fri, 2008-03-07 at 14:00 -0500, John Yates wrote:
> A bzr design goal is the ability to record information about file moves
> and renames.  This comes down to two tasks: ... Add to
> that the fact that there will never be a way to guarantee that bzr is
> privy to every modification of a workspace and it is no surprise that
> getting this UI model correct has proven so challenging.  Once one
> acknowledges that arbitrary changes to a workspace may occur without bzr
> being informed then simply attempting to enumerate fully all scenarios
> that need to be handled is a challenge.

Classic long tail problem; but that doesn't meant we can't try to have
superb behaviour for the high percentile cases.

> With the increasing discussion of smoothing the path for integrating bzr
> into various non-commmand-line-based environments perhaps some thought
> should be given to living without access to a command-line.  As I see it
> this would mean supporting an alternative UI model in which all adds,
> moves, renames and deletes would have to be identified after-the-fact,
> at the time of a commit.

Not necessarily then, just not in the imperative as you describe it. The
existence of `bzr mv --after` at least gives one the ability to
workaround the problem right now, even if manually.

> Such an after-the-fact scheme .... flailing away, ... flailing....
> Once flailing is complete one turns ... One flails with
> arbritrary, ...

Minus the flailing, a case I hit frequently is dealing with the
consequences of the *OUTSTANDING* refactoring support in the Java IDEs.
Moving a class from one package to another results in it moving on disk
from one directory tree to another [potentially new] one (along with
changes to all files in the project referencing that name); a rename of
the class usually involves a rename of the file it lives in.

One _can_ deal with these after the fact. A more likely scenario is
figuring out how to get (in this case, Eclipse) to issue an appropriate
command to bzr to tell it what it has done. That's a bit outside the
scope of bzr-eclipse (which adds commands to do VCS tasks, as opposed to
hooking into behaviours in other areas of Eclipse) but still, is an
interesting challenge.

AfC
London

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie

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