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

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> 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.

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.


        Stefan