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Re: svn commit: rev 1649 - trunk/subversion/libsvn_client trunk/subversion/clients/cmdline

From: Daniel Berlin <dan_at_dberlin.org>
Date: 2002-04-08 18:21:38 CEST

On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, Ben Collins wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 11:02:24AM -0500, cmpilato@collab.net wrote:
> > Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org> writes:
> >
> > > So what we are arguing here is:
> > >
> > > 1. User surprised that editor pops up
> > >
> > > 2. User surprised that Subversion, unlike other version systems, doesn't
> > > pop up an editor by default.
> >
> > What? I thought the only discussion here was whether or not
> > Subversion presumed that 'vi' was the default Unix editor and
> > 'notepad' was the default Windows editor. In the currently code,
> > Subversion *will* pop up an editor by default if $SVN_EDITOR, $VISUAL,
> > or $EDITOR is set. If they aren't set, the user will be informed that
> > Subversion looks in those places to find an editor. If the user
> > doesn't like getting that message, he/she should set $SVN_EDITOR,
> > which shouldn't interfere with other programs' use -- or non-use,
> > since it isn't set -- of $EDITOR.
>
> Everything I keep hearing says "the user will be surprised that an
> editor pops up". 10 million other programs on Unix default to "vi". Why
> not svn?

I'm with Ben here.
This is silly.
vi is a reasonable default.
The least surprising thing to do here is pop up vi.
It's what *everything else* does.
I've *never* seen a program tell me "Sorry, your $EDITOR variable isn't
set, i'm lost".

The idea isn't to teach the user how to use svn, it's to teach svn what
users expect.
Raising an error message rather than doing what every other unix program
does, just seems to me to be a "Let's learn the user good for not setting
an environment variable" type attitude.
 --Dan

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Received on Mon Apr 8 18:22:40 2002

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