[PATCH] revset: add "similar" keyword

[Angel Ezquerra]

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 10:32 PM, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-04-01 at 14:21 +0200, Angel Ezquerra wrote:
>> # HG changeset patch
>> # User Angel Ezquerra <angel.ezquerra at gmail.com>
>> # Date 1333282334 -7200
>> # Node ID 5027b86b02e8285493fb359367dc36f3cf481688
>> # Parent  b3fefbb95aad2a9b5b8e44e6fea4860d6690368b
>> revset: add "similar" keyword
>
> Looks like my earlier reply to this got lost. Two comments:
>
> - "similar" implies "nearly equal" or fuzzy matching, so this name is
> not quite right

You are right. I just went with Simon's suggestion. Do you have a
better idea? What about 'matching'? English not being my primary
language I'm sure someone else can come up with a much better name.

> - we probably want to allow a set as the first field, not just a single
> rev

The first field can already be a revision set (e.g. p1(.)). The only
limitation is that the set must contain a single item :P

I actually thought about supporting sets with more than one item, but
I was unsure that you'd like it. It can be easily added if you think
it is a good idea.

If we do, I'm thinking that it would do a simple loop, repeating the
search on each item in the input set. Since the searches could return
repeated results, we would need to convert everything into a python
set to remove duplicates...

Is it assumed that revsets must return ordered lists of revisions?

> We already do something sort of like this with branch(), which can take
> either a string or a set. Perhaps we want to make date, author, etc.
> take sets.

That is a good idea. Even if we did that I think that having a
"similar" (or "matching" or whichever name we choose) would be useful,
since such a function could match more than a single field at a time
(e.g. the "metadata" pseudo-field implemented on my patch).

Do you agree?

> Otherwise, this is pretty interesting.

Thanks!

Angel