Marking subrepos in 'hg status'

[Martin Geisler]

Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> writes:

> On Tue, 2010-10-19 at 09:26 +0200, Martin Geisler wrote:
>> timeless <timeless at gmail.com> writes:
>> 
>> > On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 6:05 PM, Martin Geisler <mg at aragost.com> wrote:
>> >> With your suggestion we can have
>> >>
>> >>   M sub1/
>> >>   M sub1/a
>> >>   M sub2/
>> >>   M sub2/x
>> >>   A sub1/
>> >>   A sub1/b
>> >>   A sub2/
>> >>   A sub2/y
>> 
>> I agree -- I think this is a nice and consistent way to show the
>> status.
>
> I don't like it. We've always only listed files.

Yes... but if one thinks of subrepos as versioned directories then it
makes some sense.

> In my view, the end goal of subrepo support is for you -not to have to
> be aware you're using subrepos-. I think this is more or less the
> experience in SVN and CVS.

Yes and no... some things are not very transparent in Subversion and
status is quite verbose in that it first marks the "subrepo" with an X
status and then reports the status recursively:

  $ svn status
  X       b

  Performing status on external item at 'b'
  M       b/b.txt

On the other hand, you can transparently access the subrepo:

  $ svn diff b
  Index: b/b.txt
  ===================================================================
  --- b/b.txt     (revision 1)
  +++ b/b.txt     (working copy)
  @@ -1 +1,2 @@
   b
  +b

though a plain diff gives no output or indication of the dirty subrepo:

  $ svn diff

So it's a bit inconsistent. Also, a commit will not recurse and by
defalt there is no tracking of which revision corresponds to which (no
.hgsubstate file).

> That goal is obviously still a ways off, but adding new types of
> status entries is not a step in the right direction.
>
> An alternative:
>
> hg sub -l
>
>  -l --list       show subrepository and their states

Something like that could be nice. Perhaps it could also get --add so
that users can do

  hg subrepo --add foo/bar http://foo/bar

and Mercurial will then checkout http://foo/bar as needed. It is not
like it's hard to edit the .hgsub file manually, but it is slightly
confusing for people to sync their working copy with the edited .hgsub
file afterwards.

-- 
Martin Geisler

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