Re: svn version subcommand

On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 06:55:03PM -0400, Greg Hudson wrote:
> In r10430, brane committed a change to implement "svn version" as a
> subcommand.
>
> As far as I know, this idea came up in some smoky back room and was
> implemented without much discussion.

Wow the dev mailing list is a smoky back room:

http://www.contactor.se/~dast/svn/archive-2003-11/0547.shtml

and

http://www.contactor.se/~dast/svn/archive-2004-05/1073.shtml
(which I replied to but doesn't seem to be in the archive,
msgid <20040702023155.GO307@synapse.brain.org>).

In which I said:

"I think you've suggested the fix.

svn version : prints out the version of the svn command.

We just leave --version in there for compatability and people that
happen to try it.

What do you think?
"

> I am close to -1 on it because:
> * I think we need to keep our subcommand count small. If a user
> wants to figure out how to do something, the list of subcommands
> is one of the primary places to look. The longer this list, the
> longer it will take users to find what they want.

Yeah and the problem is they can't find out how to get the version of
the client.

> * Subcommands are typically seen as verbs, not as nouns. So people
> might get derailed thinking that there is an svn subcommand to
> "version" a file or directory.

Even if they do get confused the command won't do anything harmful and
they'll quickly realize what it's for.

Plus the intended purpose is to expand it to take an argument and
provide the server version as well as the client version. Which I
realize you're also against.

-- 
Ben Reser <ben@reser.org>
http://ben.reser.org
"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking."
- H.L. Mencken
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