Re: Tortoise SVN Ignore Usability

On 6/22/06, Lübbe Onken <l.onken@rac.de> wrote:
> If you provide a crystal ball to TortoiseSVN it might guess what you intend
> to do.

There is no need for the crystal ball. As long as I tell Tortoise to
ignore, I expect it to do that. If I could say "Delete and ignore", I
want it to do that.

In the context of user friendliness, it's not good to let me chose
"ignore", when nothing appears to happen. The UI promise something it
can't live up to.

I have suggested two possible fixes which I think communicates a little better:

1. Remove the menu action on source controlled files. Let the
documentation explain why and what to do about it. When I can't tell
Tortoise to ignore, I can't be confused.

2. Replace it with a "Delete and ignore". I can always revert a
mistaken deletion from an earlier version.

> We could of course implement a "remove from version control" action
> in TortoiseSVN which just runs through this sequence of steps, but I think
> it's not worth it, because it's not the most common use case to
> un-version-control things.

That may be the case, and I respect your decision not to implement it.
I think Tortoise is a great product, and all I want is it to be even
better.

> If it is one of your most common use cases then
> it serves you right to run these steps manually, because after doing this a
> few times you might start to think *before* adding objects to version
> control.

It's not a common use case. If it were, there would be no problems as
all necessary steps would be well-known. It happens when we import
lots of files or when we fail to identify private files.

So there may exist a better fix to the problem:

3. Make it easier to ignore files and folders on first commit.

--
Thomas
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