On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 6:07 PM, <v...@lavabit.com> wrote: > I'd be very happy if I could just type: > > $ fossil co vim-7.3.154 > > I'd be even happier if I could just type: > > $ fossil co 154 >
Not to sound too pessimistic, but... How is fossil supposed to be able to know that 154 is supposed to mean abcdef154xyz or xyz154abcdef, as opposed to just being a typing mistake? This is one of those cases where the software trying to be too clever is likely to shoot the user in the foot at least 1 time in 20 (which is too often, IMO). Is this just a missing feature or an intentional design choice? > fossil places few restrictions on tag names. How long you make them is up to you, not to fossil. What you "would like to type" doesn't interest fossil - it has to be able to unambiguously determine that xyz is a "checkoutable" name, and doing that becomes very difficult (or philosophically impossible) if it has to account for every possible _partial_ match. It can do this for commands/subcommands because the set of commands is finite and hard-coded into the app (and it only partially matches at the start of a string). Branch names come from the user, and fossil does not pretend to know what the user _intends_ (and software which presumes to know what was intended often screws it up - google for "auto-correction mistakes"). What if, using your example, i actually have branches named: abc-def-ghi abc-def abc Now abc is 3x ambiguous and abc-def is 2x ambiguous. That's MY fault, not fossil's, and ignores partial matches at any position other than the start of the name: def-abc now abc is 4x ambiguous and we have no heuristic for disambiguation other than having the user tell fossil explicitly what is desired. If we added a "fuzzy chcekout" feature it could actually break cases which currently work: fossil co abc-def fossil: abc-def is ambiguous: abc-def, abc-def-ghi (doh!) IMO the only thing fossil could reasonably be expected to do to help me here is: fossil branch ls which it already does. Pair that with "grep" and a custom perl/awk/shell script and it could provide such disambiguation, but i'm willing to bet that any attempts to do so would disambiguate differently depending on the developer's personal tastes and might even differ depending on project-level conventions, e.g. using PLATFORM-VERSION, where "checkout PLATFORM" would "prefer" the highest-numbered version for that platform (which of course introduces the problem of sorting version numbers, which is not always trivial in and of itself). Just my 0.02 Euros. PS: don't take my response too seriously: often i denounce proposals only moments before someone else commits a patch for them ;). -- ----- stephan beal http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/ http://gplus.to/sgbeal
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