[darcs-devel] New ignore and unignore commands

Juliusz Chroboczek Juliusz.Chroboczek at pps.jussieu.fr
Fri Sep 15 05:50:28 PDT 2006


I'm redirecting this back to the users list, which I feel is where it belongs.

Me:

>> No strong opinions here, but I actually prefer Pietro Abate's
>> suggestion -- add a new option '--exclude-files'' that takes a regexp
>> of files to ignore.  As far as I can tell, this has the full
>> functionality of ignored_file -- just add ``ALL exclude-files ...''
>> to your prefs file.

Zachary Landau:

> Maybe I'm just being thick tonight, but at that point, how is this
> different from the normal boring file?

The boring and excluded files have subtly different semantics.  Both
are useful, but I'm not sure that the difference is important enough
to warrant two distinct notions.

Boring is only considerred by some commands, notably ``darcs add -r''.
If you manually add a boring file (``darcs add proprietary-module.o''),
the boring file is permanently overridden, and the file will be considered
by ``darcs record -a'' in the future.

Boring certainly has the right semantics for a persistent setting: if
you've manually added a file, this probably means that you want it to
be managed by Darcs from now on.

Excluded, on the other hand, is considered by all commands.  If I say

  darcs record -a --exclude debug.c

I probably want to ignore any changes to debug.c even though it's
being managed by darcs.

Exclude clearly has the right semantics for an ephemeral setting (a
command line option, as opposed to a prefs file).

So the distinction is useful, but is it useful enough to be included
in Darcs, and hence impose an additional conceptual burden on all new
users?  I don't have a strong opinion (I'd like David to make a call),
but it's certinly not useful enough to take up two good command names
such as ``darcs ignore'' and ``unignore''.

                                        Juliusz




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