--repos patch rebased against 1.07

[Adam Spiers]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 6:14 PM, Joey Hess <joey at kitenet.net> wrote:
> Adam Spiers wrote:
>> please could you cherry-pick this new version of the patch?
>
> Most people will not use it. Some people will use it when they could
> have simply used symlinks to point to the actual location of their
> repositories to provide short names for them.

OK, so if I went to the effort of setting up these symlinks, how would
I use them to accomplish the equivalent of

  mr -r zsh,emacs up

in a single, easy-to-type command?

> It has the potential to affect any current user of mr, who could be
> confronted with a warning message about inability to slot a repo
> into this other namespace.

That's a corner case which should happen very infrequently, but if you
don't like it, I can easily move that warning to a new --check-names
option or similar.

> It adds the complexity of a separate namespace, which feels
> strongly like a bad idea.

Why?  The existing namespaces do not facilitate per-repository
granularity (the repository space already exists, but individual
members cannot be conveniently referenced) so AFAICS this is filling a
gap in functionality.

> You seem to be using the idea as your sole hammer to knock down various
> nails that can be pulled in simpler ways, as seen in
> <CAOkDyE-Tanqr8zsNMuXJiemYnb=Vb-wbk1_cqrGAdgQReDVmWA at mail.gmail.com>.

[ For the benefit of anyone else following, he's referring to
  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.home-dir/463/focus=467 ]

I still don't see any easier way of achieving what I want.  Perhaps
your answer to my first question above will enlighten me.

> Stow's need for a flat namespace also seems to have a simpler approach
> of echo $MR_REPO | tr / _

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.home-dir/356/focus=386