Reg : Keyword expansion

[Christian Ebert]

[ where has the OP gone ;-) ]

* Matt Mackall on Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 16:08:47 -0500
> On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 21:15 +0100, Roger Gammans wrote:
>> On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 14:46 -0500, Mark A. Flacy wrote:
>>> That is incorrect.  Well, maybe *you* believe that is what you need to
>>> get that done, but that doesn't make it true for anyone else.
>>> 
>>> You appear to have missed the point that DVC systems do not track
>>> individual file changes.
>> 
>> Which is why I was surprised when using the kw extension that the 
>> "Version = {tags} {node|short}" expansion seem to expand to the to
>> describe the changeset in which the containing file was most recently
>> modified not that of the working directory parent.
> 
> This is part of what I'm referring to when I say that keywords are
> "extremely slow". If we updated the global revision id in every file
> that contained $Id$, we could literally have to rewrite the entire
> workingdir contents on an update that changes just one file. I suspect
> our keyword extension is making a compromise here in the name of sanity.

Sanity is not my main concern ;-)

The rationale for expanding to the most recently modified node is
the main purpose of the extension: compare versions of a single
file. This *is* useful when you collaborate with people (yes,
there are non-programmers) who do not use any kind of version
control system. I can quickly check which version of the text we
are working on they have.

I.e. the keyword extension is about *file-wise* identification
instead of *repo-wide*. The comment in the source admits openly
that this is against the spirit of DVCS. But I found (and still
find) it definitely useful when working with "outsiders".

I tried to outline all this, including several warnings, caveats
and references to repo-wide versioning in the wiki page.

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/KeywordExtension

c
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