add
The often used add command is how you tell fossil to
include a (usually new) file in the repository.
fossil is designed to manage artifacts whose role is being
"source" for something, most probably software program code or other
text. One can imagine all kinds of ways to let fossil know just what
constitutes a source; the simplest and most direct way it
actually finds out is when you give it the
fossil add path command.
It's reasonable to think of
the [./cmd_import.wiki | import]
and [./cmd_clone.wiki | clone]
commands as very high-powered versions of the add
command that are combined with system level file movement and
networking functions. Not particularly accurate, but reasonable.
Typing fossil add myfile causes fossil to put
myfile into the repository at the next
commit—provided you issue it from within the source
tree, of course.
By contrast, fossil add mydirectory will add
all of the files in mydirectory, and
all of its sub-directories. In other words, adding a directory will
recursively add all of the directory's file system descendants to the
repository. This was an oft-requested feature, recently implemented.
It is very flexible. Only when you add a directory do you get the
recursive behavior. If you are globbing a subset of files, you won't
get the recursion.
Realize that the repository is not changed by the
add command, but by the commit command.
add myfile tells fossil to "mark"
myfile as part of the repository. Only commands which actually
manipulate the content of the repository can physically put source
artifacts into (or remove them from) the repository.
Just to keep things symmetric, there are also commands that can
manipulate the repository without affecting the checked-out sources
(see [./cmd_pull.wiki | fossil pull], for instance.)
It's worthwhile reiterating that fossil is storing the content
of source artifacts and the names of the artifacts in their "native
habitat", a sequence of "temporal slices" (aka "versions") of the
state of the whole system, and a set of unique identifiers. When you
add a file to a repository, the path to the file is a part of
the name of the file. There is a mis-match between the file
system's idea of a directory (a file containing pointers to files) and
fossil's idea (a substring of the name of the artifact.) The names of
the artifacts specify their relative locations because of the way the
file system interprets them. If you don't keep this in mind, you may
fool yourself into thinking fossil somehow "stores
directories." It doesn't, and believing it does will eventually
confuse you.
See also: [./cmd_rm.wiki | fossil rm],
[./cmd_import.wiki | fossil import],
[./cmd_clone.wiki | fossil clone],
[./cmd_commit.wiki | fossil commit],
[./cmd_pull.wiki | fossil pull],
[./cmd_settings.wiki | fossil setting] (async),
[./reference.wiki | Reference]