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RE: Re: svn rollback (Was: Re: svn commit: rev 2162 - ...)

From: Bill Tutt <rassilon_at_lyra.org>
Date: 2002-06-12 20:26:31 CEST

> From: Garrett Rooney [mailto:rooneg@electricjellyfish.net]
>
> On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 11:08:37AM -0700, David Mankin wrote:
> > Maybe "svn rollback" can be a command that just prints a useful
tutorial
> > on svn merge. It can show that if you want to rollback TO a certain
> > version, you use _____ and if you want to rollback the change IN a
> > certain version you use ____. Then it meets everybody's
expectaions
> > (except if they expected it to work...).
>
> that's what perforce does with their 'p4 help move' (or rename, i
> forget). it just tells you how to use 'p4 integrate' to fake it.
> that annoys me every time i have to rename a file at work. if there's
> going to be a way to do something that people would want to do, and
> it's at all non-obvious how one would do it, then we should provide
> the command, assuming it's not a lot of code to do it.
>

I think the problem is that it's non-obvious what rollback means to the
user, even if writing both versions of what we think the command should
do is very trivial coding effort wise. Adding user shortcuts that
confuse the user isn't helping the user out.

> i mean come on, we're talking about one file for 'rollback' (which i
> just rewrote to work like everyone other than me assumed it should,
> i'll commit it if we decide we want the command), that's about 100
> lines, much of which is the header.
>
> if we also want 'undo', which would do what my original rollback does,
> that's another 100 lines of client code. it's nothing at all, and
> makes life easier for the user.
>

GUIs make life easier for users. Command line programs with large
numbers of options don't make anybodies life easier. (Users,
maintainers, support staff, etc...) I mean just check out how many
subcommands BitKeeper and Perforce have, it's totally insane.

Bill
P.S. I'm not saying that some sort of rollback subcommand shouldn't be
committed, but I do think that there shouldn't be a directly accessible
menu item in a GUI that displays a dialog or something as the interface
to a possible "svn rollback" command. In all likelihood the GUI would
have a button on the "svn log" dialog that when pressed did a "svn
revert; svn merge" based on the selected revision.

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Received on Wed Jun 12 20:26:58 2002

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