[Monotone-devel] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
(Well, okay, not gen-u-ine revision numbers, but an incredible simulation.) m7 is a Python script that works as a drop-in replacement for running monotone directly. It's known to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It requires Python 2.3.5 and monotone 0.22. It is open-source, released under a Zlib-style license. The current version is 0.1, the first public release. Why might you want to use m7? m7 automatically tags each new revision with a reasonably-unique tag, including a monotonically increasing number. Also, anywhere you can specify a revision id, m7 accepts a shortcut syntax (: followed by the revision number) to specify one of these tags. For instance, to refer to your thirty-fifth local revision, you would just say :35. Finally, m7 has a variant of annotate that substitutes these new abbreviations for the 40-character hex tags (wherever possible), making it a lot easier to read. You can read more about it, and download a copy, here: http://www.midwinter.com/~lch/programming/m7/ Cheers, larry ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Mon, 26 Sep 2005 19:15:26 -0700, Larry Hastings <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: larry> You can read more about it, and download a copy, here: larry> http://www.midwinter.com/~lch/programming/m7/ Looks nice, except for one thing: I wish you would have used a different cert than the tag one, and I certainly hope noone will choose to populate the monotone database. "monotone list tags" will just not be the same experience (I can already see myself screaming "GAH!")... 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] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote: I wish you would have used a different cert than the tag one, and I certainly hope noone will choose to populate the monotone database. "monotone list tags" will just not be the same experience (I can already see myself screaming "GAH!")... Well, I agree about not populating net.venge.monotone, simply because m7 is still in its early stages. Though I do hope people will play with it in earnest, and I am eating my own dog food. As far as not using tag certs for the ids, I don't really agree. Ignoring the specific argument cited above, are there any other reasons they shouldn't they be tags? After all, this revision number tag that m7 writes out is "a symbolic name given to a revision", and that's the very definition of a tag cert, straight out of the monotone documentation. I see it as entirely appropriate. There's also a near-term logistical problem. Right now, if I used an arbitrary other cert, I wouldn't be able to easily get a list of them out of monotone. Tags I can list with monotone list tags. But arbitrary certs are unretrievable unless either you know something about them (like what revision id they are joined to) or you're willing to delve into SQL. Though I'm sure if I whined enough / contributed code, we could have a nice high-level interface for querying for these in the next release. As for not wanting to see untold kajillions of tags, I see that as a user-interface issue. The solution is better tools at dealing with arbitrarily large collections of tags, not telling people "oh, don't use a tag there! you'll clutter up monotone list tags!" For instance, m7 list tags could weed out all tags that conform loosely to its default tag specification. Or only show you tags from the last month, or six months. Or both. Cheers, larry ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Tue, 27 Sep 2005 05:45:39 -0700, Larry
Hastings <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
larry> As far as not using tag certs for the ids, I don't really
larry> agree. Ignoring the specific argument cited above, are there
larry> any other reasons they /shouldn't/ they be tags? After all,
larry> this revision number tag that *m7* writes out is "a symbolic
larry> name given to a revision", and that's the very /definition/ of
larry> a tag cert, straight out of the *monotone* documentation. I
larry> see it as entirely appropriate.
Hmm, maybe this is a question of use case. I use tags as a symbolic
name given to a revision *to signal an event*, for example to tell
everyone what revision I used to build a specific release (as it's
currently done with monotone itself). If there are suddenly tags on
*every* *single* *revision*, they immediately lose their value in my
view.
larry> There's also a near-term logistical problem. Right now, if I
larry> used an arbitrary other cert, I wouldn't be able to easily get
larry> a list of them out of *monotone*.
Hmm, the basic functionality is already there with the selector
c:{certname}[={certvalue}]. So whenever you want to find a specific
revision through a m7 number, the corresponding monotone command would
be this (if you use "my-tag" as cert name):
monotone automate select c:m7-tag=lch:penguin:7
larry> Tags I can list with *monotone list tags*. But arbitrary certs
larry> are unretrievable unless either you know something about them
larry> (like what revision id they are joined to) or you're willing to
larry> delve into SQL. Though I'm sure if I whined enough /
larry> contributed code, we could have a nice high-level interface for
larry> querying for these in the next release.
for x in `monotone automate select c:tag='monotree*'`; do monotone list certs
$x; done
Yes, the output could look nicer, but it shows that it's quite
possible to list arbitrary certs using current monotone commands and a
little bit of filtering. If you want, I can probably create a quick
perl hack (I need a little more time with Python, as I'm quite a
newbie with that language, still) that outputs arbitrary certs in the
same nice way as "monotone list tags".
larry> As for not wanting to see untold kajillions of tags, I see that
larry> as a user-interface issue. The solution is better tools at
larry> dealing with arbitrarily large collections of tags, not telling
larry> people "oh, don't use a tag there! you'll clutter up *monotone
larry> list tags*!" For instance, *m7 list tags* could weed out all
larry> tags that conform loosely to its default tag specification. Or
larry> only show you tags from the last month, or six months. Or
larry> both.
OK, I've two (probably more, but these are the ones I can express
right now) problems with that:
1. it makes special cases of tags. So far, a tag is a tag is a tag.
What you propose is that a tag is a tag... unless it looks this
way.
2. it assumes that everyone will use m7, and completely ignores the
possibility of a mixe environment, where some use monotone directly
(I've no interest in localised revision numbers, so I'll probably
be one of those if m7 is used with the monotone repository) while
others use m7.
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] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote: for x in `monotone automate select c:tag='monotree*'`; do monotone list certs $x; done Ah, so they could be pulled out of monotone without resorting to SQL today. Thanks! (It would be an O(N) operation, as compared to an O(1) operation with monotone list tags, but it should still be fast enough that the user wouldn't notice.) 1. it makes special cases of tags. So far, a tag is a tag is a tag. What you propose is that a tag is a tag... unless it looks this way. I don't see how these tags are "special cases". My intent was that they be normal tags, just like any other tag. The only thing arguably "special" about them are that m7 provides a special command-line shortcut to refer to them, m7 tannotate can recognize and abbreviate them, and there are a lot of them. But they work just like normal tags, because they are normal tags. I can say monotone cat revision lch:flu:7 if I like, works fine. Indeed, m7 currently relies on that fact; the : shortcut simply gets expandsed into t:$username-$computername- before it runs monotone. 2. it assumes that everyone will use m7, and completely ignores the possibility of a mixe environment, As with your previous point, I fail to see how this approach "ignore[s] the possibility of a mixed environment". There is nothing in m7's design or implementation that would preclude interoperating with non-m7 users; m7 does nothing that breaks monotone's data model. You continue to use monotone directly, and I could sugarcoat it with m7, and we could push and pull between our databases without incident. If you're really just restating your earlier point about "well, but there'd be a lot more tags now, and that would be inconvenient", then my reply is again "that's a user interface issue". Let me be clear: I am hardly opposed to changing these tags to custom certs. Indeed, that could offer its own advantages. But I am curious about the reaction of the general monotone community. I am now well acquainted with Mr. Levitte's opinion; what do the rest of you think? Cheers, larry ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 07:07 -0700, Larry Hastings wrote: > Let me be clear: I am hardly opposed to changing these tags to custom > certs. Indeed, that could offer its own advantages. But I am curious > about the reaction of the general monotone community. I am now well > acquainted with Mr. Levitte's opinion; what do the rest of you think? I think it shouldn't be in the same namespace as what we currently use tags for. Presumably, whichever is used more should be in the 'tag' certs and the other should get it's own certs (say, 'm7-tag' or 'release' depending on which). Might be best to put them in 'm7-tag' certs for now, and see if they get popular enough to switch? ...actually, if we had a convenient way to list arbitrary certs the way we list tags I think I'd prefer to have releases marked with 'release' certs, which would leave tags open for using something like this. Tim ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Tue, 27 Sep 2005 07:07:59 -0700, Larry Hastings <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: larry> >1. it makes special cases of tags. So far, a tag is a tag is larry> > a tag. What you propose is that a tag is a tag... unless larry> > it looks this way. larry> > larry> > larry> I don't see how these tags are "special cases". Some tag values have special meaning to the program while others don't. That's what make those special cases. larry> But they work just like normal tags, because they are normal tags. I disagree with that. From a user's point of view, I don't see them as normal. larry> >2. it assumes that everyone will use m7, and completely larry> > ignores the possibility of a mixe environment, larry> > larry> > larry> As with your previous point, I fail to see how this approach larry> "ignore[s] the possibility of a mixed environment". This is under the assumption that "m7 list tags" filters the output so the localised revision number tags aren't shown, which means that monotone developpers using m7 won't be hit with 3513 (that's how many revisions there are in my monotone database right now) localised revision number tags, while those using monotone directly will get them in their faces (which they probably didn't expect or wanted). That, to me, is a significant different in user experience, and quite undesirable. larry> If you're really just restating your earlier point about "well, larry> but there'd be a lot more tags now, and that would be larry> inconvenient", then my reply is again "that's a user interface larry> issue". I'm sorry, are you saying that the users should adapt to the program? OK, sorry for all the blabering. I'll shut up about this for a while now. 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] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Tue, 27 Sep 2005 09:48:32 -0500, Timothy Brownawell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: tbrownaw> ...actually, if we had a convenient way to list arbitrary tbrownaw> certs the way we list tags ... Is this desirable? I've no problems create that command, the questions is only what to call it. "monotone grep certs"? "monotone list certs" is already taken, and with a very different meaning... 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] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Tue, 27 Sep 2005 16:55:28 +0200 (CEST), Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: richard> I'm sorry, are you saying that the users should adapt to the program? My appologies, that's an attack, I admit it and regret it. Please ignore it. 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] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 17:00 +0200, Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote: > In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Tue, 27 Sep 2005 09:48:32 -0500, Timothy > Brownawell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > > tbrownaw> ...actually, if we had a convenient way to list arbitrary > tbrownaw> certs the way we list tags ... > > Is this desirable? I've no problems create that command, the > questions is only what to call it. "monotone grep certs"? > "monotone list certs" is already taken, and with a very different > meaning... 'show', perhaps? ...what'd be nice is to make it take an arbitrary selector, get the matching revisions, and then output the IDs along with the values for each (ambiguous?) item in the selector. So, mtn show 'c:release/b:*' would give a list of (ID, 'release' cert value, branch) lines, and mtn show 'c:release/b:net.venge.monotone' would give a list of (ID, 'release' cert value) lines, since all listed revision would be in the same branch. Maybe printing some lines at the end, giving the values of selector items that are the same on all the listed revisions, so this example would have a line "branch: net.venge.monotone" at the end? Tim ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Tue, 27 Sep 2005 10:43:13 -0500, Timothy Brownawell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: tbrownaw> On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 17:00 +0200, Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote: tbrownaw> > Is this desirable? I've no problems create that command, tbrownaw> > the questions is only what to call it. "monotone grep tbrownaw> > certs"? "monotone list certs" is already taken, and with tbrownaw> > a very different meaning... tbrownaw> tbrownaw> 'show', perhaps? Hmm... Actually, in that case I'd prefer "show certs" to have the current functionality of "list certs" and for "list certs" to get new functionality that's a bit more like "list tags"... At least, that would make more linguistic sense to me. tbrownaw> ...what'd be nice is to make it take an arbitrary selector, tbrownaw> get the matching revisions, and then output the IDs along tbrownaw> with the values for each (ambiguous?) item in the selector. tbrownaw> So, tbrownaw>mtn show 'c:release/b:*' tbrownaw> would give a list of (ID, 'release' cert value, branch) lines, and tbrownaw>mtn show 'c:release/b:net.venge.monotone' tbrownaw> would give a list of (ID, 'release' cert value) lines, since tbrownaw> all listed revision would be in the same branch. Maybe tbrownaw> printing some lines at the end, giving the values of tbrownaw> selector items that are the same on all the listed tbrownaw> revisions, so this example would have a line "branch: tbrownaw> net.venge.monotone" at the end? I like the ideas. All it would take would be to rework the selector parser so it actually feeds back some sensible information for the layer above to work with... hmm, easy to say, perhaps not as easy to do. It's definitely a bit bigger than "bite-size" :-). On the other hand, with Nathaniels proposal for "magic" selectors a little while ago, we need to rework this part either way, so why not? I'm up for the task, as long as I'm not expected to have it done by tomorrow or anything unreasonably quickly, as I'm a bit swamped at work. 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] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
The people have spoken: m7 should use custom certs, not tags. Announcing m7 version 0.2! You can download it at the m7 homepage: http://www.midwinter.com/~lch/programming/m7/ And I'm hoping that someone actually will download it, someday. Maybe even someday soon. This change worked out pretty clean. The custom cert is named m7-db-$username-$computername, whose value is just the revision number. This means you could theoretically populate other people's checkins with local revision numbers and not worry too overly much about collisions. (Though I think that wouldn't be cricket.) However, it's not all skittles and beer. Producing the list of tags with their local revision numbers is a lot slower this way, so now there's a noticable slowdown before the output of tannotate. The price of progress, I guess. Justin Patrin said: Oh, and as for O(1) vs. O(n) I think that's a very false assumption. True, you're going to start more processes, but monotone itself has to do internal things [...] Sure, but it's the per-monotone-process overhead that I was really speaking to. I imagine that monotone gets going, it's mighty quick at culling certs from the database. If I could do it all in one invocation of monotone, it would be a hell of a lot quicker than the N invocations I sometimes must use now. larry ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
On 9/27/05, Larry Hastings <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote: > for x in `monotone automate select c:tag='monotree*'`; do monotone list > certs $x; done > > Ah, so they could be pulled out of monotone without resorting to SQL today. > Thanks! (It would be an O(N) operation, as compared to an O(1) operation > with monotone list tags, but it should still be fast enough that the user > wouldn't notice.) > > > 1. it makes special cases of tags. So far, a tag is a tag is a tag. > What you propose is that a tag is a tag... unless it looks this > way. > > I don't see how these tags are "special cases". My intent was that they be > normal tags, just like any other tag. The only thing arguably "special" > about them are that > > > m7 provides a special command-line shortcut to refer to them, > m7 tannotate can recognize and abbreviate them, and > there are a lot of them. > But they work just like normal tags, because they are normal tags. I can > say monotone cat revision lch:flu:7 if I like, works fine. Indeed, m7 > currently relies on that fact; the : shortcut simply gets expandsed > into t:$username-$computername- before it runs > monotone. > > > 2. it assumes that everyone will use m7, and completely ignores the > possibility of a mixe environment, > > As with your previous point, I fail to see how this approach "ignore[s] the > possibility of a mixed environment". There is nothing in m7's design or > implementation that would preclude interoperating with non-m7 users; m7 does > nothing that breaks monotone's data model. You continue to use monotone > directly, and I could sugarcoat it with m7, and we could push and pull > between our databases without incident. > > If you're really just restating your earlier point about "well, but there'd > be a lot more tags now, and that would be inconvenient", then my reply is > again "that's a user interface issue". > > > Let me be clear: I am hardly opposed to changing these tags to custom > certs. Indeed, that could offer its own advantages. But I am curious about > the reaction of the general monotone community. I am now well acquainted > with Mr. Levitte's opinion; what do the rest of you think? > I agree with Richard. Tags are meant to be used for special cases where you want to keep track of a set of revisions, such as released versions. If you add tags which happen for every revision then tags become far less useful. A revision is a revision, not a tag. Certs would be much more appropriate for this. As shown it can be implemented as-is and future additions to monotone can make it easier. Oh, and as for O(1) vs. O(n) I think that's a very false assumption. True, you're going to start more processes, but monotone itself has to do internal things to deal with these commands. Unless you check monotone's internals for how it handles the commands calling one O(1) and one O(n) is a misnomer. Likely they're something like O(n) O(nlogn) -- Justin Patrin ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
Re: [Monotone-devel] Announcing "m7", a monotone front-end... which adds revision numbers!
On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 10:40:50AM -0700, Larry Hastings wrote: >Sure, but it's the per-monotone-process overhead that I was really >speaking to. I imagine that monotone gets going, it's mighty quick at >culling certs from the database. If I could do it all in one invocation >of monotone, it would be a hell of a lot quicker than the N invocations I >sometimes must use now. See 'automate stdio', 'automate certs', 'automate select'. ViewMTN has a python interface to the 'automate stdio' interface. -- Nathaniel -- Eternity is very long, especially towards the end. -- Woody Allen ___ Monotone-devel mailing list Monotone-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
