[RFC] 'basic/additional command set' - adding svn subcommands without destroying our learning curve

The need to keep our basic command set small, to avoid svn becoming daunting
to new users, and making the learning curve intolerably steep, is not a new
issue.

I agree with it, but taken alone, it stops us adding useful utility
subcommands - the sort of thing I am thinking of:
  svn purge: Remove unversioned files from a WC
  svn sync: 'svn add' all unversioned files, 'svn rm' all missing files

These are minor issues - implementable as scripts easily enough - but
despite being periodically requested, we've held off implementing them for
the reason mentioned above.

Whilst scripts are useful in the short-term, it seems very wrong that
everyone needing these has to write/install scripts whereever they need
these operations - there is also the problem of Windows, where scripting is
far more difficult.

To break the deadlock between the opposing motivations of 'keep svn simple',
and 'add useful utilities', I'd like to propose that we introduce the notion
of a basic and an additional command set. Practically, all this means is
splitting commands between `svn --help` and `svn --help-additional`, and
dividing our documentation of commands in the same way.

I think this will give us a way to add less-used, but still very useful
functionality to svn, whilst sidestepping the elevated learning curve which
has dissuaded us from doing so in the past.

Thoughts?

Max.

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Received on Wed Nov 2 14:02:34 2005