compare more than one env?

[wanderingstan]

I'm getting errors on my stan/ui-stuff branch since changing the -c param to only accept one arg. It seemed to be a bug that it took more, since it seems odd to compare current with more than one env, and the instructions said it compared exactly 2:
8fedf34#diff-745d835925dfbedf0741af6a49b9152bL22

But this has broken the -c on my branch, it looks like it really expected there to be a list of files. Was there an expectation that users could compare 2, 3, or more envs at once?

[werg]

@wanderingstan sorry I didn't see this one earlier. I set the -c command to have variable number of parameters, because we ostensibly wanted to have the ability to compare

1. the current environment to the last commit (0 args -- not implemented)
2. the current environment to a provided file or URL (1 arg)
3. two different files / URLs (2 args)

anything above that would be weird.

I see you changed it to only accept one arg -- what do you think of the above approach though?

[wanderingstan]

Until we really need option 1, I'd be in favor of keeping --compare to a simple "compare with one other" meaning.

Option 3 makes me wonder, "but can't we just use regular diff for this?" which drives to a maybe deeper question thats been rising in my mind: diffenv right now both "takes a snapshot of current env" and "compares two envs". This leads to some confusion as in, what do we call such a snapshot? Early on we called it "a diffenv", but that gets confusing when we're actually doing a comparison. It might be overthinking it, but I'm toying with the idea that this should split into (1) a tool to dump/snapshot/capture current environment and (2) a tool to diff the outputs of 1 -- if regular diff is not enough.

[werg]

We sort of could have a getenv (or some other name) and a diffenv?

[wanderingstan]

Yeah exactly. And again, I'm not 100% sold on the idea, just playing it out.

Also feel like it would also be good to nail down the word for the things we're creating and comparing.

• env
• environment
• development environment snapshot
• total environment
• machine state
• development snapshot
• ...etc

"env" or "environment" seem the clearest, if that's not confusing. (e.g. your file structure is not strictly part of your environment, but you could make a case that it is when you're running code.)

So then you would use getenv (or dumpenv?) to put everything into a file. And diffenv would be the prefered tool for comparing two envs--but of course you could also use just diff or some other tool.

[werg]

Hmm. listenv?