On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 06:30:28PM -0500, cmpilato@collab.net wrote:
> Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> writes:
>
> > Justin Erenkrantz <jerenkrantz@apache.org> writes:
> >
> > > cmpilato brought up that you could accidentally type 'svn revert
> > > --recursive' too, but I don't place much stock in that use case -
> > > there are easier ways to shoot yourself in the foot.
> >
> > What if you're about to type "svn revert --recursive subdir" but you
> > typo and hit return (or the cat walks on the keyboard, or whatever)
> > right before you type subdir?
>
> That's exactly the accident that has happened to me in the past. In
> fact, I made the mistake just this afternoon.
>
I've noticed that Red Hat, and I presume other modern operating systems,
have started, aliasing rm to "rm -i". I suppose the argument is "if you're
not knowledgeable enough to unalias rm, you probably need the -i".
Frequently, one user interface for all users is not the most appropriate
goal.
What if, instead, svn config defaulted to "novice-mode", in which potentially
destructive things called a user-agent-callback for confirmation. I'll bet
GUI people would love to have that feature (to have the system tell them that
something destructive and/or non-reversible was going to happen). In fact,
the callback system may well be a pre-requisite for any real GUI work.
This could be generalized to allow the user-agent to implement --force by
always returning "keep going" to these callbacks. If the API is sufficiently
rich, the user could choose, for example, "I mean what I say when I 'svn rm',
but prompt me for 'svn obliterate'."
--ben
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Received on Thu Jul 11 14:29:43 2002