[RFC][#30159] Fix to make bzr st and bzr st -S display paths relative to cwd.

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 08:14:17AM -0800 I heard the voice of
Eddie Parker, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> Ah, yes.  Regarding the 'spurious whitepaces', [...]

Well, *I*'m big on lots of whitespace.  But the bzr devs aren't so
much.  And form changes like that mingled with content changes are
generally frowned upon, even if you agree with making them.


> I'd be interested to hear about the other suboptimality's, even if
> you don't believe yourself qualified to comment.

For one thing, at a glance it seems to be opening the WT fresh once
for every path being displayed.  Very inefficient at the least, and
begging for locking issues.


> May I ask why?  I'm honestly curious, as most other VCS I use don't
> have this concept of printing from the root and I've never found
> myself wanting it

Because I have a mental model of my project[s], and with the full
paths I always know what files it's talking about.  With cwd-relative
paths, I have to know where I am in the tree and then mentally sort
out arbitrarily high ascensions to figure out what's actually changed.

I note that 'hg stat' prints root-relative paths.  So does 'mtn stat'.
Sure, svn and CVS are cwd-relative, but they only show cwd-descended
status anyway.



-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.