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Re: Command-line verbosity

From: Karl Fogel <kfogel_at_galois.collab.net>
Date: 2000-10-24 15:02:49 CEST

Jim Blandy <jimb@savonarola.red-bean.com> writes:
> Okay --- why do you pay attention to the left-side letters? What
> information do you want from them? Visual grep is notoriously
> unreliable. I would like to find a more definite way to provide
> people the same information.

The most important piece of information I get from them is this: that
CVS is doing something, that it's not hung and that in fact it has
operated on a certain list of files so far.

Secondarily, I find out which files are receiving updates, which are
locally modified, which are both, which are conflicted.

Several changes that would make this behavior even better, IMHO:

  1. I don't need to see (by default) what directory it's in at any
     given moment. Seeing what is changed is enough, I don't need to
     know about read-only operations on up-to-date data. (This would
     be even more pointless in Subversion, since it won't spend so
     much time finding out what has changed in the repository anyway.)

  2. Use "G" for "merGed" (cvs history already does), instead of
     printing out multiple lines for merges.

  3. Restate all conflicts, and any other high-priority notices, at
     the end of the output, following some standard tag line.

It's important that the output be human-readable, terse, and easy for
programs to parse. CVS almost achieves this already, and (not
coincidentally) I find its behavior almost exactly what I want.

Clearly, all of the above is a matter of personal preference -- you
seem not to be so happy with the way CVS works. We should gather more
feedback (hint: command-line team, run a survey). Although I'd
obviously love for the above to be the default behavior, I could live
with it being an optional verbosity level too. :-)

(But in general, I think a lot of users, not just myself, are happier
if interactive commands that might take more than a few seconds *do*
print out progress reports, especially when the reports can consist of
data that has a meaning other than just "I'm making progress." CVS
and Subversion both fall into this category -- luxury!)
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:12 2006

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