showing shelf info with 'bzr status'

[Neil Martinsen-Burrell]

On 2010-08-22 04:25 , Parth Malwankar wrote:
> I was looking into bug #403687 [1] about showing shelved changes
> with 'bzr status'. It seems like an important enough wishlist as I can
> see 6 votes on it :-)
>
> There is a merge proposal in place[2]. This proposal basically
> updates 'bzr status' to include the list of shelves in output.
>
> Sample output with the current patch:
>
> [bzr-grep]% ~/src/bzr.dev/403687-st-shows-shelve/bzr st -S
>   M INSTALL
> ? x
>   S 1:<no message>
>
> [bzr-grep]% ~/src/bzr.dev/403687-st-shows-shelve/bzr st
> modified:
>    INSTALL
> unknown:
>    x
> shelves:
>    1:<no message>
>
> While the original report talks about showing per-file shelf information,
> just listing the shelves (or just indicating N shelves exist) seems like a
> reasonable fix to me that doesn't require too much change.
>
> Vincent suggested that it may be good to discuss this change on the
> list as its a UI change. Currently, an S is used in the second column
> to indicate a shelf. The report and Vincents comment on the mp also
> suggests that it may be better to use a one line output, something
> like 'N shelves exist.' instead of listing the shelves. That seems fine
> to me. The user can then use 'bzr shelve --list' for actually viewing
> the shelves.
>
> I would like to hear your thoughts and suggestions regarding this
> change.

I think that a low bandwidth notification such as "N shelves exist" is 
enough of a pointer to the shelve command, which already has the 
capability of listing shelves.  If necessary, we could add that pointer 
explicitly: 'N shelves exist.  See "bzr shelve --list" for details.'  I 
think that status should emphasize the status of files and directories 
and that the list of shelves deserves to be at one remove from that. 
Just my opinion.  Peace,

-Neil