--repos patch rebased against 1.07

[Adam Spiers]

Hi Joey,

I don't know how much time you are currently able to devote to mr
given your kickstarter-related activities (which totally rock BTW ;-),
but I would really like to revisit the below unresolved issues at some
point soon if possible, because they are blocking my goal of
out-of-the-box integration between mr and GNU Stow in a similar manner
to what has already been accomplished with vcsh.  I have been using my
lib/stow plugin for mr for about 10 months now and it works well, but
not without some kind of solution to the below problems.

Thanks,
Adam

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 11:55 AM, Adam Spiers <vcs-home at adamspiers.org> wrote:
> 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