[Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
So, one issue that came up in the discussion last week about renaming the monotone executable was what to do with the bookkeeping directory: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.monotone.devel/6160 Only a few people replied, and this is something that seems to incite discussion more than any other naming-related issue (except for the executable name being too long) -- e.g., this has come up over with the darcs crowd repeatedly (see most recently http://bugs.darcs.net/issue129), svn has a special hack to let you change, etc. So, since 0.26 isn't coming out for at least a week anyway (stupid end-of-term), I'd sort of like to hear more opinions on this, to get a sense of the community feeling... The essence is: do we want the bookkeeping dir to something like: _MTN _mtn .MTN \__ If one of these names, also specify what the configuration .mtn / dir in ~ should be called .MTN-bookkeeping \__ or other less stupid suffixes accepted .mtn-bookkeeping / too I guess there are probably other options, but I can't think of any. ALSO: please state not just what you _prefer_, but what you would consider _annoying_. Or even _just_ what you would find annoying, because really, this is a stupid little point where about the best we can hope for is to minimize offensiveness. As a quick reminder, main arguments for underscores I know: -- it's an easy way to see "in your peripheral vision" that a dir is under monotone -- umm... VMS compatibility ;-) Main arguments for leading dots: -- I guess some people find the presence of a bookkeeping dir at the top level distracting? Main arguments commonly encountered when discussing other systems (or that might unconsciously influence intuitions), that don't apply: -- CVS dirs are totally obnoxious -- yes, but that's partly because they're scattered all over the tree, so the conclusion doesn't _fully_ carry over -- One shouldn't hide huge space-filling files inside a . dir -- monotone is one of the few DVCSes that doesn't, so never mind -- well, though, I guess I could imagine Cheers, -- Nathaniel -- "If you can explain how you do something, then you're very very bad at it." -- John Hopfield ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
Nathaniel Smith wrote: So, since 0.26 isn't coming out for at least a week anyway (stupid end-of-term), 0.26 is coming out that soon? I figured it was months away. Rock on! I'd sort of like to hear more opinions on this, to get a sense of the community feeling... As a Windows guy, it doesn't make any difference to me. If I get tired of looking at the directory I can always set the "hidden" bit. I suppose I would find a lengthy name like .MTN-bookkeeping-directory-nobudy-cumz-in-here-sekrit tiresome. I take it the leading underscore is to help with sorting order? I find that a bit strange, as it would sort to the middle, between the upper- and lower-case characters. Though I guess it's preferable to sorting to the middle of the upper-case letters, as M does. Still, ever the iconoclast, how about a plus-sign, as in +MTN? That would sort it to the head of the directory every time, and it's not a special character to any shell I know of. (And, yes, I genuinely expect that suggestion to go exactly nowhere.) I've stood near a VMS system on several occasions, and even looked at the chassis of one once while a coworker pointed at it. I am ambivalent on whether monotone should limit its options in order to accomodate VMS's antiquated filesystem semantics. After all, and please correct me if I'm wrong, I understand that VMS has been on its way out for years. (Truthfully, I'm surprised that folks are using bleeding-edge software like monotone on something as, well, non-bleeding-edge as VMS.) One possible solution would be a mtn command that prints the basename of the bookkeeping directory on the local computer, so that scripts can ask for it by name. Thus a well-written script could run unmodified on VMS. A poorly-written script could get diffs from people who care ;) Cheers, larry ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 18:31 -0800, Nathaniel Smith wrote: > [...] So, since 0.26 isn't > coming out for at least a week anyway (stupid end-of-term), I'd sort > of like to hear more opinions on this, to get a sense of the community > feeling... > > The essence is: do we want the bookkeeping dir to something like: > _MTN > _mtn I think I'd prefer _MTN . > .MTN \__ If one of these names, also specify what the configuration > .mtn / dir in ~ should be called If everything else is shortened from "monotone" to "mtn", these would be the obvious names for ~/$MONOTONE_CONFIG/ . Which makes them not so good for bookkeeping. > .MTN-bookkeeping \__ or other less stupid suffixes accepted > .mtn-bookkeeping / too Why hide it? Be proud of your choice in VCS, and show the world. ;p Tim ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 06:31:16PM -0800, Nathaniel Smith wrote: > As a quick reminder, main arguments for underscores I know: > -- it's an easy way to see "in your peripheral vision" that a dir is > under monotone > -- umm... VMS compatibility ;-) windows -- visual studio doesn't like leading dots apaprently > Main arguments for leading dots: so that 'find * -type f ' doesn't hit metainfo files; it's easier to not include with the shell than exclude. ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 09:04:10PM -0600, Timothy Brownawell wrote: > > .MTN-bookkeeping \__ or other less stupid suffixes accepted > > .mtn-bookkeeping / too > > Why hide it? Be proud of your choice in VCS, and show the world. ;p Hm, this is a good idea. Leaving aside the prefix question, a suffix of -workspace seems good: self-descriptive and advertising the nature of the containing directory. Which just leaves us to decide between: .mm-workspace _mm-workspace ++mm-workspace :-) (The config dir should stay as ~/.monotone and/or %APPDATADIR%/monotone on Windows) -- Dan. pgpzMcaOV12AP.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
Nathaniel Smith wrote: svn has a special hack to let you change, etc. So, since 0.26 isn't coming out for at least a week anyway (stupid end-of-term), I'd sort I seriously think we should decouple the renaming of things from the 0.26 release. Since all of this is so bike-shed-y anyhow, there's no sense rushing into something silly for the sake of this one, already big, release. None of what we've seen is any better, or any worse, than what we already have. People will probably complain either way but since there isn't much in the way of consensus perhaps the status quo is the right thing for now. of like to hear more opinions on this, to get a sense of the community feeling... The essence is: do we want the bookkeeping dir to something like: _MTN _mtn .MTN \__ If one of these names, also specify what the configuration .mtn / dir in ~ should be called .MTN-bookkeeping \__ or other less stupid suffixes accepted .mtn-bookkeeping / too How many complaints about MT have we heard? I don't really like the "_" prefix or "-longish-suffix" things, but I don't have any problem with MT or MTN or MTO or MMM. Visible doesn't seem to be a bad thing and it's worked for CVS for 20+ years. My second vote would be for .FOO for whaterver FOO we land on but I realize that this causes problems for visual studio or some other equally silly tool. On another, somewhat related note, I once looked at what it would take to load ~/.monotone/monotonerc first and possibly use it to determine where the book keeping (should we call it admin) dir lives. This seems very do-able and would potentially allow people to call this thing whatever they want or move it away from the workspace entirely. Cheers, Derek ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 11:17:49PM -0700, Derek Scherger wrote: > I seriously think we should decouple the renaming of things from the > 0.26 release. Since all of this is so bike-shed-y anyhow, there's no > sense rushing into something silly for the sake of this one, already > big, release. I tend to agree. We have this iface-refactor branch which might invoke other significant user-visible changes in the way things work, and the naming of subcommands, and such. It seems sensible to me that at the point that lands, we rename stuff to represent the UI flag day (or even have compatibility code under the old name, if someone really feels the need). The counter argument that we're going to be breaking people's workspaces because of rebuilding revid's (and MT/work) seems weak. Apart from this one-off inconvenience, one of the nice things about rosters landing and the 0.26 code as it presently stands is that it *doesn't* change much if anything about what the user sees. We can quite honestly say this release is about lots of good, sound, important and interesting internal changes and fixes that you mostly won't have to worry about unless you want to. That has a a kind of cleanliness and reassuring nature to it: it seems much less worrying for users who just want to get their projects done, using monotone, especially if the idea of large internal changes makes them nervous. They know that they won't have to relearn expected behaviour or usage patterns in order to figure out whether something went wrong. I know renaming things isn't a big deal, but it is. It's visible change, just when it would be best to say "it works just like before, but much better". We even don't have the --merges/--no-merges UI change we experimented with on mainline for a while. There is one UI exception to this, with the new attr handling. That's such a huge win, especially on projects where a large proportion of files are binary / manual_merge. I lead a project like this, and it's a royal pain; making it go away is no threat to UI comfort and expectations. In most cases, we just stop asking for merge assistance for .mt-attr, and probably users just stop noticing the previous wart and only notice that "merges work much better now" (for several reasons related to the internal changes, attr related or not). > None of what we've seen is any better, or any worse, than > what we already have. People will probably complain either way but since > there isn't much in the way of consensus perhaps the status quo is the > right thing for now. I tend to agree with this, too. If anything else (other than bug and doc fixes and tests) is to fit in with 0.26 as it stands now, it would be rev salts if we need them. Otherwise, I really think we just want to get it out the door; 0.25's deficiencies are hurting. -- Dan. pgpZZqLW1nnDB.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
Derek Scherger wrote: I seriously think we should decouple the renaming of things from the 0.26 release. Since all of this is so bike-shed-y anyhow, there's no sense rushing into something silly for the sake of this one, already big, release. None of what we've seen is any better, or any worse, than what we already have. People will probably complain either way but since there isn't much in the way of consensus perhaps the status quo is the right thing for now. I agree. How many complaints about MT have we heard? I don't really like the "_" prefix or "-longish-suffix" things, but I don't have any problem with MT or MTN or MTO or MMM. Visible doesn't seem to be a bad thing and it's worked for CVS for 20+ years. I agree also with this. I, however, strongly dislike the .something alternative. I've had many bad experiences with .svn, thanks (I keep forgetting about it and making all sort of stupid mistakes). Ciao, Riccardo ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
Nathaniel Smith wrote: The essence is: do we want the bookkeeping dir to something like: _MTN This gets my second vote. My first vote goes to plain "MTN". Regarding the configuration dir, I think it should be ~/.monotone on Unixy things, %APPDATA%\monotone on Win32 and whatever VMS likes on VMS. Basically, follow convention and use the full name. When, inside a source tree, I find an "MTN" dir, I can make a good guess at what it is. When I find .mtn in ~, that's (imho) a somewhat longer pause to remember what the hell .mtn was. (OK, not if I'm using it daily --- but if I'm someone who checked something out with monotone once, 6 months ago...). It just seems more polite to use the full name here... -- Jon Bright Silicon Circus Ltd. http://www.siliconcircus.com ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Tue, 14 Mar 2006 19:00:21 -0800, Larry Hastings <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: larry> After all, and /please/ correct me if I'm wrong, I understand larry> that VMS has been on its way out for years. (Truthfully, I'm larry> surprised that folks are using bleeding-edge software like larry> monotone on something as, well, /non-/bleeding-edge as VMS.) OK, I'll correct you, quickly and swiftly. VMS is very much alive and has actually gotten a development boost lately. It's been ported to Itanium, with version 8.0 being the first that ran on that iron. The latest release is 8.2 with 8.3 coming around the corner. Quite a lot of open source has been ported to VMS, some key ones (like Mozilla, Apache and some of OpenSSL) by HP themselves, with a lot else by others (like yours truly). Speaking of the file system, there are actually two current ones on VMS. They're called ODS-2 and ODS-5 (ODS = On Disk Structure or On Disk System, I forget which). ODS-2 can be considered antiquated, but is still in active use on many installations, simply because many are used to it and not entirely ready to embrace the newer structure yet. A dotfile style directory isn't possible on ODS-2, but it *is* possible on ODS-5. VMS, on its way out? Gimme a break! Yeah, it's a very carefully designed system, and it isn't as bleeding edge as constantly updating your Debian [unstable], but then, HP's biggest customers are things like the military, banks, hospitals and so on, who all depend on their system being reliable, and VMS has a very strong (and deserved, IMO) reputation as a 24x7 system. If you want to stay with that kind of reliability, you can't be "bleeding edge". However, for individual sites to want to use a good SCM (and I do consider monotone to be among the best if not the best that I've tinkered with so far) can't be wrong, even if that SCM is considered bleeding edge and they otherwise run on a platform that isn't bleeding. After all, I'm sure some run monotone on a Debian [stable], which I would consider very non-bleeding edge as well. larry> One possible solution would be a mtn command that prints the larry> basename of the bookkeeping directory on the local computer, so larry> that scripts can ask for it by name. Thus a well-written larry> script could run unmodified on VMS. A poorly-written script larry> could get diffs from people who care ;) You know, I actually like that idea. Cheers, Richard - Please consider sponsoring my work on free software. See http://www.free.lp.se/sponsoring.html for details. -- Richard Levitte [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://richard.levitte.org/ "When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -- C.S. Lewis ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
I've been thinking a lot about the issue lately, and this is what I
came up with:
Bookkeeping directory should be something visible. I really want to
see it when I stand in the root of a monotone-controled directory
tree. And then, there's the platform issue that I've already
discussed. Other than that, I don't really care what the name will
be, _MM, MM, _MTN, MTN, _MT, MT, ...
For the configuration directory, it's a bit of a different matter.
There is already a lot of tradition in there, and I see no point in
breaking that too much. That means it will differ between platforms.
But either way, I would prefer that to have the full name ("monotone")
in it, to make it distinct from the bookkeeping directories if for no
other reason. So on Unix, I'd like to keep it as it is, ~/.monotone.
I think someone else has already said their piece on Windows about
that. For the day when I finally get to start a VMS port, I'll have
to think of the right way to do it there (could be a combination of
logical names that point at the place to find things, a text file for
the lua hooks and an indexed file to store keys in, for example).
Cheers,
Richard
-
Please consider sponsoring my work on free software.
See http://www.free.lp.se/sponsoring.html for details.
--
Richard Levitte [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://richard.levitte.org/
"When I became a man I put away childish things, including
the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
-- C.S. Lewis
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Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
On 3/14/06, Nathaniel Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So, one issue that came up in the discussion last week about renaming > the monotone executable was what to do with the bookkeeping directory: > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.monotone.devel/6160 > Only a few people replied, and this is something that seems to incite > discussion more than any other naming-related issue (except for the > executable name being too long) -- e.g., this has come up over with > the darcs crowd repeatedly (see most recently http://bugs.darcs.net/issue129), > svn has a special hack to let you change, etc. So, since 0.26 isn't > coming out for at least a week anyway (stupid end-of-term), I'd sort > of like to hear more opinions on this, to get a sense of the community > feeling... > > The essence is: do we want the bookkeeping dir to something like: > _MTN > _mtn > .MTN \__ If one of these names, also specify what the configuration > .mtn / dir in ~ should be called > .MTN-bookkeeping \__ or other less stupid suffixes accepted > .mtn-bookkeeping / too > > I guess there are probably other options, but I can't think of any. > > ALSO: please state not just what you _prefer_, but what you would > consider _annoying_. Or even _just_ what you would find annoying, > because really, this is a stupid little point where about the best we > can hope for is to minimize offensiveness. > > As a quick reminder, main arguments for underscores I know: > -- it's an easy way to see "in your peripheral vision" that a dir is > under monotone > -- umm... VMS compatibility ;-) > Main arguments for leading dots: > -- I guess some people find the presence of a bookkeeping dir at the > top level distracting? > Main arguments commonly encountered when discussing other systems (or > that might unconsciously influence intuitions), that don't apply: > -- CVS dirs are totally obnoxious > -- yes, but that's partly because they're scattered all over the > tree, so the conclusion doesn't _fully_ carry over > -- One shouldn't hide huge space-filling files inside a . dir > -- monotone is one of the few DVCSes that doesn't, so never mind > -- well, though, I guess I could imagine > Here's my 2c as a user. The fact that there is only one bookkeeping dir for monotone makes me very very happy (SVN and CVS are annoying as hell with their per-directory bookkeeping). This makes me care a lot less what the bookkeeping dir is named. My gut instinct is that visible is better as it just makes me kind of happy to see that MT dir in my checkout. ;-) I also think that the name should be the same as whatever command name is chosen, so MTN would be good. A leading underscore *could* be used, but I feel that just MTN is fine. And, after all, since there is only *one* bookkeeping dir in th eroot of the checkout, it doesn't stop people from having an MTN dir in the sub-dirs. Or wait...does it? I'm not sure about this as I've never tried -- Justin Patrin ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
On 3/14/06, Nathaniel Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So, one issue that came up in the discussion last week about renaming > the monotone executable was what to do with the bookkeeping directory: My order of preference: MTN _MTN _mtn MT .MTN .mtn Bamboo shoots under my fingernails .MTN-bookkeeping .MTN-`head -$RANDOM /usr/share/dict/words | tail -1` I vote against any -suffix name, due to its being annoying and taking up too much horizontal space causing ls to be able to use only one or two columns. I'd prefer to keep the existing name for ~/.monotone. Cheers! Shaun ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
Let me get this straight, the leading dot (ie ".SVN") is just a trick to make it hidden on Linux/Unix right? Don't carry that onto windows, if you want it hidden on all platforms, use "." on the platforms where it is appropriate, and use the hidden attribute on windows, and so on for all supported platforms. The leading dot doesn't do anything but screw up Web projects in VStudio, which I agree is lame, but this is what I have to work with on a day to day basis. I agree with whoever mentioned that just one folder in the root is good, having ".SVN" (or actually "_SVN" due to the hacked client) sprinkled all over my folders is annoying. And as long as the directory name is unlikely to collide with something already in place does it really matter what it's called (this would probably mean that rather short and generic names as 'MT' might be inappropriate, MT-Workspace perhaps, or something to that effect)? What shell doesn't have auto-complete nowadays anyway? :) As for configuration settings, follow the platform standard, AppData on windows, ~ on Linux, etc. Sure all of this requires more work, but there should already be an abstraction layer for platform quirks anyway right and your end users will be happier because your software respects their platform. /Patrik On 3/17/06, Shaun Jackman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 3/14/06, Nathaniel Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > So, one issue that came up in the discussion last week about renaming > > the monotone executable was what to do with the bookkeeping directory: > > My order of preference: > > MTN > _MTN > _mtn > MT > .MTN > .mtn > Bamboo shoots under my fingernails > .MTN-bookkeeping > .MTN-`head -$RANDOM /usr/share/dict/words | tail -1` > > I vote against any -suffix name, due to its being annoying and taking > up too much horizontal space causing ls to be able to use only one or > two columns. > > I'd prefer to keep the existing name for ~/.monotone. > > Cheers! > Shaun > > ___ > Monotone-devel mailing list > Monotone-devel@nongnu.org > http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel > > > ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] [bikeshed] once more on bookkeeping dirs...
Nathaniel Smith wrote: > So, one issue that came up in the discussion last week about renaming > the monotone executable was what to do with the bookkeeping directory: > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.monotone.devel/6160 > Only a few people replied, and this is something that seems to incite > discussion more than any other naming-related issue (except for the > executable name being too long) -- e.g., this has come up over with > the darcs crowd repeatedly (see most recently http://bugs.darcs.net/issue129), > svn has a special hack to let you change, etc. So, since 0.26 isn't > coming out for at least a week anyway (stupid end-of-term), I'd sort > of like to hear more opinions on this, to get a sense of the community > feeling... > > The essence is: do we want the bookkeeping dir to something like: > _MTN > _mtn Leading underscore has precedence in Darcs. They use _darcs. I don't like all uppercase so I vote "_mtn". > .MTN \__ If one of these names, also specify what the configuration > .mtn / dir in ~ should be called > .MTN-bookkeeping \__ or other less stupid suffixes accepted > .mtn-bookkeeping / too > > I guess there are probably other options, but I can't think of any. > > ALSO: please state not just what you _prefer_, but what you would > consider _annoying_. Or even _just_ what you would find annoying, > because really, this is a stupid little point where about the best we > can hope for is to minimize offensiveness. > > As a quick reminder, main arguments for underscores I know: > -- it's an easy way to see "in your peripheral vision" that a dir is > under monotone > -- umm... VMS compatibility ;-) > Main arguments for leading dots: > -- I guess some people find the presence of a bookkeeping dir at the > top level distracting? > Main arguments commonly encountered when discussing other systems (or > that might unconsciously influence intuitions), that don't apply: > -- CVS dirs are totally obnoxious > -- yes, but that's partly because they're scattered all over the > tree, so the conclusion doesn't _fully_ carry over > -- One shouldn't hide huge space-filling files inside a . dir > -- monotone is one of the few DVCSes that doesn't, so never mind > -- well, though, I guess I could imagine > > Cheers, > -- Nathaniel > VH signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
