bzr status needs --no-recurse

[Kevin Bulgrien]

In migrating to bzr from other version control system(s), it is a constant "annoyance" that bzr status is so noisy. I compensate by liberally using `bzr status .`, but many times I want only status of a directory I am working in and not a large sub-tree under the folder.

This is largely because `bzr status` helps me quickly see what I have touched in the current folder. I do this a lot when I am doing scripting because often scripts do not involve great trees of files.

The --no-recurse on the status command is also quite helpful to me when, for example, I am piecemeal committing things into a new whatchamacallit repo... whether it be a web-site, user directory, or whatever. In cases like that I don't really want to do a recursive commit all in one operation while I dynamically decide what I want to bother controlling.

I use --no-recurse on vcs status at work daily, therefore when I come over to bzr, I miss it terribly there.

--no-recurse is too long also. -N is better. I know there is a bug/suggestion to make -N equivalent to --no-recurse, but I don't know if those switches are parsed the same place for all uses.

[Kevin Bulgrien (kbulgrien)]

I've been told that `bzr status --versioned` might be a workaround. In some use-cases it probably would achieve the desired results. A corollary issue is that --versioned does not seem as intuitive as --no-recurs, especially when someone is migrating over to bzr from something like <cough>cvs</cough>, where things can be done locally as opposed to recursively. bzr is attractive because it seems to try and largely succeed at letting people use various workflows that they are used to in other VCS. Adding --no-recurse would help in this regard.

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

If '--versioned' would do what you want, you might want to look into using 'bzr ignore' more liberally. Since it sounds like you have a lot of unversioned files that bzr doesn't know what to do with (ignore will tell bzr you don't want to it to think about them)

[Kevin Bulgrien (kbulgrien)]

`bzr ignore` is used already, but there are times I'd rather have the noise of the uncommitted resources and enjoy the freedom to limit the noise in more situations. Perhaps this is idiosyncratic usage, but it seems to work for me.