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

[Martin Geisler]

Ben Finney <ben+bazaar at benfinney.id.au> writes:

> Martin Geisler <mg at lazybytes.net> writes:
>
>> Yes, you cannot track an empty directory with Mercurial.
>
> Another case where I consider Mercurial flawed. Empty directories are
> first-class objects I want tracked by the VCS.

Yeah, if you're used to tracking empty directories, then that's a loss.

>> I often see people argue that "Mercurial doesn't track directories" =>
>> "Mercurial will be bad at merging"
>
> I'm not making that argument, so I'm bemused that you spend so much
> effort against it in this thread.

If your only point was that 'hg status' could be better at showing a
rename to the user, then please make that point. Instead you wrote

> * Proper tracking of all changes in the history, including renames and
>   merges.

and that is something very different. Tracking history is very important
in Mercurail, so I take offense when you say we don't track it properly.

>> Yeah -- if you require renames to be reported as elegantly as Bazaar,
>> then we fail that requirement.
>
> Thanks, I'm glad to have reached agreement with you. Is that lack
> something soon to be fixed?

It wont be fixed in core Mercurial, but I'm very tempted to write an
extension to do it.

Fixing it would violate our backwards compatibility rules. We maintain a
stable output format so that people can write shell scripts and whatnot
around Mercurial -- the output of 'hg status' is probably the most
important output of them all.

Personally, I think that's a little backwards, but that's how it is.
People who want a more high-level API are welcome to use something like
JavaHg[1] or python-hglib[2].

[1]: http://javahg.aragost.com/
[2]: http://selenic.com/repo/python-hglib

-- 
Martin Geisler

Mercurial links: http://mercurial.ch/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20111025/f5cc5731/attachment.pgp>