Proper tracking of file-level operations: rename, directories, merges

[Martin Geisler]

Colin D Bennett <colin at gibibit.com> writes:

> On Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:22:08 +0200
> Martin Geisler <mg at aragost.com> wrote:
>
>> Colin D Bennett <colin at gibibit.com> writes:
>> 
>> > On Fri, 21 Oct 2011 08:57:00 +1100
>> > Ben Finney <ben+bazaar at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
>> >
>> >>...
>> >> $ hg status
>> >> A bar/beans
>> >> A bar/eggs
>> >> A bar/spam
>> >> R foo/beans
>> >> R foo/eggs
>> >> R foo/spam
>> >> =====
>> >
>> > It took me a moment to see the significance of this behavior of
>> > hg:
>> >
>> > You can't distinguish the single file with modified content from
>> > the other files which have no content change.
>> 
>> That is false. After renaming and modifying the file, you get:
>> 
>>   $ hg status -C
>>   A bar/beans
>>     foo/beans
>>   A bar/eggs
>>     foo/eggs
>>   A bar/spam
>>     foo/spam
>>   R foo/beans
>>   R foo/eggs
>>   R foo/spam
>> 
>> Not pretty, but it shows where each file was renamed from. To see the
>> modifications you use 'hg diff': ...
>
> My point still stands: you can't look at the 'status' summary output
> and see which file was changed an which was merely renamed.

I agree -- the output is not very nice.

However, I was told that Bazaar has "Proper tracking of all changes in
the history, including renames and merges." and that implies that there
is something wrong with, say, Mercurial's way of tracking this. I don't
think anybody demonstrated that and now it seems that the point is
merely that Bazaar has "Nice output for renames.", which I'll be happy
to agree with.

> Diff is not a substitute for this, because I don't want to wade
> through a many-page diff just to see which files changed. Sure, it's
> just output, I understand Mercurial has the information, but that's
> little help to the user who wants it to “just work.”

Yes, looking through pages of diff output is not a good substitute. I
only brought in 'hg diff' to show you that Mercurial records the right
information.

-- 
Martin Geisler

Mercurial links: http://mercurial.ch/
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