sparkles:dman — Workspaces (multi-repo grouping)

How dman groups repositories. Grouping is many-to-many tags on each repo; tags[0] is a reserved, auto-detected directory group, and the rest are free-form labels. A mid-phase feature layered on the single-repo VCS core (D11). See Repo catalog for the underlying catalog and selection.

Tags model

Each cataloged repo carries a string[] tags (in RepoRef) — a repo can belong to several workspaces at once:

struct RepoRef {
    // …path, name, backend, colocated, remotes, lastScanned…
    string[] tags;      // tags[0] = the directory group; tags[1..] = user labels
}

• tags[0] — the primary directory group. The parent-of-repo-roots directory the repo sits under, resolved by auto-detection (below), with single-repo collapse: a lone repo's tags[0] is the repo itself — no parent is invented.
• tags[1..] — free-form user labels. Arbitrary cross-cutting groupings (work, oss, frontend, …), managed explicitly and independent of on-disk layout.

Catalog queries filter by any tag (dman repo list --tag <t>), so the same repo appears under each workspace it is tagged with.

Directory-group auto-detection (populates tags[0])

Walking up from the current directory, first match wins:

1. an explicit group-marker file/dir on an ancestor (strongest signal);
2. an existing dman group-state directory on an ancestor (dman has run here);
3. heuristic — the top-most ancestor that directly contains a repo-root child, bounded by a stop directory (default $HOME) so it can't over-reach;
4. single-repo fallback (a lone repo is its own group);
5. plain CWD-repo fallback; a structured error if no repo is found at all.

Declarative config (optional)

A file at the group root overrides auto-detection: the directory-group name, a membership allowlist (missing/non-repo entries warn, they don't fail), an optional server/endpoint pin, and any default tags to apply to member repos.

Group identity

A directory group's stable, machine-independent ID is the order-independent hash of its members' canonical remote URLs (the repos sharing a tags[0]) — reusing dman's existing remote-URL identity (Repo catalog), so two machines with the same repos compute the same group ID. This is the unit the later distributed phase's portable layout descriptor and remote reproduction operate on.

CLI

dman workspace list | show | create | members | delete [--clean]
dman repo tag add|remove <tag> [--repo …]      # manage tags[1..]
dman repo list --tag <t>                        # filter the catalog by any tag

• --tag/--group <name> overrides CWD auto-detection (for scripts/CI); a single-repo-only command rejects it with a clear message.
• delete removes tracking but leaves files; --clean also removes markers/state.
• Config toggles can disable group auto-detection and auto-registration.

Scoping & resolution

Resolution is two-layer: detect the directory group (establishing the in-scope repo set), then run single-repo selection within that scope. State is classified as group-scoped (shared across a group's repos) or repo-scoped, governing where it lives in the catalog.