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Re: RFC: svn mergeinfo improvements for 1.5

From: C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2008 23:28:53 -0400

Mark Phippard wrote:
> I agree with you in principle, but Dan and I have been thinking and
> talking about this since last summer. I think if you really stop and
> think about it, it is obvious that log output is what someone wants
> here. In my opinion, a list of revisions is useless. What script
> would that possibly drive? If you are just going to feed them back
> into a merge command, then that is a fairly useless script. svn merge
> will already do this for you automatically by just omitting the
> revision argument. Maybe you know you only want revisions over 1000
> for some reason. OK, again, svn merge -r1000:HEAD will do this
> automatically.
>
> People are going to want to run this command so they can make informed
> decisions about what to merge. Such as "have we nominated everything
> for backport into 1.5 that needs to be". To answer those questions,
> you want a filtered log. It does not make sense to have the command
> already have all that information and just discard it when we know
> that is what people want.

There is some legitimacy to just printing revisions. After all, even if
most folks want log output, they can pipe those revisions into 'svn log'
just as easily as anything else.

That said, *all* of our output ('cept the XML flavors) is designed to be
piped and munged and scripted and so on, yet still actually deliver some
immediate value that doesn't require extra processing. 'svn status' doesn't
just print paths that have to be piped into 'svn status -v'. 'svn log'
doesn't generate just revisions that have to be piped into 'svn log -v'.
The downside is that people do have to use 'cut' and deal with tabular
output, sure. But to date, that doesn't seem to have caused any great
controversy. For these reason I endorse the use of log-style output for
this mergeinfo-reporting subcommand.

The only thing I think folks will want almost as much as logs are the diffs
of the revisions. But the performance cost of showing those diffs is
prohibitive enough to rule out showing them automatically, and those same
folks can just run 'svn mergeinfo -q | cut ... | showchange.pl and get logs
and diffs together if they wish.

-- 
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
CollabNet   <>   www.collab.net   <>   Distributed Development On Demand
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Received on 2008-03-28 04:29:15 CET

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