view tests/svn-safe-append.py @ 25881:9de443515f1d stable

help: scripting help topic

There are a lot of non-human consumers of Mercurial. And the challenges
and considerations for machines consuming Mercurial is significantly
different from what humans face.

I think there are enough special considerations around how machines
consume Mercurial that a dedicated help topic is warranted. I concede
the audience for this topic is probably small compared to the general
audience. However, lots of normal Mercurial users do things like create
one-off shell scripts for common workflows that I think this is useful
enough to be in the install (as opposed to, say, a wiki page - which
most users will likely never find).

This text is by no means perfect. But you have to start somewhere. I
think I did cover the important parts, though.

#!/usr/bin/env python

__doc__ = """Same as `echo a >> b`, but ensures a changed mtime of b.
Without this svn will not detect workspace changes."""

import sys, os

text = sys.argv[1]
fname = sys.argv[2]

f = open(fname, "ab")
try:
    before = os.fstat(f.fileno()).st_mtime
    f.write(text)
    f.write("\n")
finally:
    f.close()
inc = 1
now = os.stat(fname).st_mtime
while now == before:
    t = now + inc
    inc += 1
    os.utime(fname, (t, t))
    now = os.stat(fname).st_mtime