[PATCH RFC] status: add terse option flag (issue4119)

[Sean Farley]

Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> writes:

> On Mon, 2015-04-06 at 11:22 -0700, Sean Farley wrote:
>> # HG changeset patch
>> # User Sean Farley <sean at farley.io>
>> # Date 1427261050 25200
>> #      Tue Mar 24 22:24:10 2015 -0700
>> # Node ID c85c11535052d49e36533b10d2f07943b71c40b4
>> # Parent  7c6f9097e2e03be6630d782114ac312264f7333a
>> status: add terse option flag (issue4119)
>> 
>> Based on work by Martin Geisler, this patch adds the ability to abbreviate the
>> ouput of status by only listing the parent directory for multiple files. By
>> default, we only do this for unknown files but control this through the
>> experimental.terse option.
>
> Once we take -t, it's going to be really hard to change. It stops being
> an experiment in like 9 days. So I'd really like to see a discussion why
> it's not terse for all states before I take this.

Yep, I agree.

> If the answer is "because people have lots of unknown files but not
> other sorts of files", it might be useful to think about why we show
> unknown files at all: it's to help people remember to add things and
> thereby not make broken commits.
>
> Thus, the proper tool to cut down on unknown clutter is hgignore, and
> the proper number of unknown files is 0. People who can't be bothered to
> be tidy can just use hg status -q (= hg status -mard). Adding -t doesn't
> even save a keystroke and probably just reinforces ?-blindness.
>
> So I can see the value in a general option that collapses paths to try
> to get a sense of large statuses, but I don't find one that's ?-specific
> very compelling.

I'm fine to enable it for all modes. I bring it to the mailing list now
for discussion since it's been talked about before.

I'm also fine to delay this until the sprint. One of my concerns if I
alias 'st = st -t re:' then I have no way to get that behavior without
some kind of '--relative' flag.