bzr status

[David Cournapeau]

David Ingamells wrote:
>
> David Cournapeau wrote:
>> Ben Finney wrote:
>>  
>>> David Cournapeau <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> writes:
>>>
>>>      
>>>> OTOH, the whole point of a relative status is that generally, when you
>>>> are inside a tree, you don't care so much about files "above" you.
>>>>           
>>> I don't find that to be the case at all. I find this attitude most
>>> prevalent in people who use Subversion, where the limitations of the
>>> system encourage arbitrary aggregation of directory trees that would
>>> be better tracked separately.
>>>       
>>
>> I may have phrased it poorly: I certainly did not mean that for a *given
>> project*, you are always in a given subtree. But during development, it
>> is certainly current to only care about a subdirectory for a *given
>> period of time* (which may well change all the time, of course).
>>
>> I never thought about this before using git, but at least I largely
>> prefer default view per subdirectory. It makes it easier to handle diff,
>> blame, etc... Basically everytime you need to give a path, you have it
>> from status. It is true that the git index (and not committing anything
>> by default which is not in there) makes it even more natural, though.
>>
>> David
>>
>>   
> I'm having a difficulty understanding why this debate is getting so
> hot and also a difficulty understanding what David C has said above.
>
> David C, you seem to be arguing for status reporting only the files in
> or below your current directory (cwd), but they you say "Basically
> everytime you need to give a path, you have it ..." which, to me, is
> an argument for whole-branch status reports.

Of course status should report about the whole repository, I don't think
anyone has argued for the contrary. My remark only concern the reference
path for status output. More concretely, for the project foo:

foo/subdir1/subdir2 $ bzr st

Gives me the path relative to foo (where .bzr is). So if I want to do
bzr diff, bzr log, bzr blame, etc... on a given file as outputed from
bzr st, I have to change the path relatively to cwd.

IOW, bzr st output and bzr blame/log/diff input don't use the same
reference. It is even difference for bzr st itself:

foo/subdir1/subdir2 $ bzr st
modified:
    foo/subdir1/subdir2/bar.txt

foo/subdir1/subdir2 $ bzr st bar.txt
modified:
    foo/subdir1/subdir2/bar.txt

> It would be easier to use conceptually (for me at least) to have bzr
> support a "bzr status ." 

It already does :)

David