best way to add unknowns from the command line?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On 3/22/12, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:

> 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.

I think this is what Chris meant by "silly" -- a real convenience (for some
hypothetical users including Chris, I suppose) has been omitted.  I know
that in many applications directory listing can take painfully (FVO "pain"
== "perceive" ;-) long, and you'd like to avoid it.

> 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.

Sure, and that's true for me ... and I suspect it's true for everybody who's
used to using command line tools like, say rcs and tla.  But I suspect
there are a lot of users out there who are only now coming to use VCS,
who won't have those habits (which I can dimly remember spending a
small amount of effort to develop myself, YMMV), and also there will be
build directories, directories full of large binaries (IIRC Chris is a games
developer with lots of those hanging around).  Certainly, individuals can
develop "arboreal hygiene", and conventions about naming ignorable
directories easily enough, but organization-wide it may be costly.