best way to add unknowns from the command line?

[John Arbash Meinel]

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On 3/22/2012 10:40 AM, Alexander Belchenko wrote:
> Vincent Ladeuil пишет:
>>>>>>> Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net> writes:
>> 
>>> Chris Hecker пишет:
>>>> bzr qadd takes forever to launch because it expands entire
>>>> unknown directories on load, which is silly.
>> 
>>> I don't think it's silly.
>> 
>> Me neither but hey, some people just talk this way (figure of
>> speech and stuff like that [1])...
>> 
>> On the other hand, an option to stop at the unknown directory
>> level could probably help (such directories could then be either
>> ignored or explored one level at a time or in full under user
>> control).
> 
> The whole idea of add is "add unknown files and directories". Where
> we should stop? Why? Why don't user ignore directories with huge
> amount of garbage? Where is balance?
> 

bzr status intentionally does not descend into unknown or ignored
directories. We try not to walk them at all, because many trees have a
"build" directory with thousands of files that we would have to walk
for no purpose.

On the other hand, 'bzr add' does recursively add everything.

A potentially interesting tradeoff would be to have 'qadd' be able to
collapse directories, and default to collapsing unknown directories.
Selecting them could still recursively add all files underneath.

Though I would also say it depends on how 'hygenic' people are with
their directories and their ignore rules. A plain 'bzr add' is almost
never a mistake in my directories. Everything I don't want to add is
already ignored.

As such, I think it would be good to get some more background about
how they want to use the tool and why that method is valuable.

Certainly *I* don't work that way, so I don't have the knowledge about
how to make that experience good for the user.


For example, one thing we've certainly had a bug open on is having
'bzr status' when in a subdir give the relative paths. Which would
make it easier to cut-and-paste them to the 'bzr add' command. Is that
a better solution for Chris?

I'll also mention that I pretty much never sit in a command line in a
subdirectory. Which is also different from how some people structure
their code. I might occasionally descend, but I don't really ever need
to add a file from a different parent dir.

I'm curious to learn a bit more about how Chris uses the tool.

John
=:->
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