bug#737: vc-dir reports unregistered-then-deleted file is "up-to-date"

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

  > > The reason a single person asked about this is to be able to use CVS
  > > offline.  But vc-dir is useless with CVS offline, it will just tell you
  > 
  > Actually, the stay-local feature in CVS is (for me) not so much to work
  > offline (since CVS is not really usable in that circumstance), but so
  > that M-x vc-dir RET doesn't take ages to give me a buffer.  I very often
  > want to have a *vc-dir* buffer to see which files I've modified, then
  > either open them, or get a diff of the changes I made, ... all those
  > operations can be made in much less time than it takes for "cvs
  > update -n" (or "cvs status") to finish.

Wow, this answer is a blast from the past...
You can get the above by setting a variable, doing it by default for CVS
does not seem like a good idea.

  > Supposedly, those operations can even all be performed offline in Svn,
  > so stay-local might be even more useful there.
  > 
  > > What Stefan wanted was predicated by the existence of a vc-pull function
  > > to balance for not being able to see the status of the remote
  > > files.
  > 
  > Actually, vc-pull is not just needed to make up for "stay-local".
  > It's just needed for all the more modern backends.  So it's
  > a high priority.
  > 
  > > Such a function does not exist, and it probably won't during the
  > > feature freeze.
  > 
  > Yes, it's too bad that vc-dir is still lacking such features at
  > this point.  Not enough contributors, it seems.

You are giving vc-dir too much credit here, in itself it's nothing more
than a pretty printer and a GUI that can return multiple selections.
What's missing is the mechanism to do these things in VC.  Once VC has
support for vc-pull, adding such support to vc-dir should be easy.

It's strange that VC does not get more contributors.
It might be because people think that VC is not good enough, but now
that should not be the case anymore, since it can do operations on
multiple files/directories it's in a decent shape.
Or maybe people think that VC is too complex (I certainly thought so
until I first looked at it), but it's really not, once you look
underneath it's pretty straightforward.
It's even more strange that version control is so important nowadays,
and just about everyone seems to have a very strong opinion about it,
but not enough to want to contribute to VC...

Maybe you want to make some public statement saying that VC is in good
shape now, and that contributions to improve it are welcome and very
much wanted...