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RE: svn diff, svn merge, and vendor branches (long)

From: Kean Johnston <jkj_at_sco.com>
Date: 2002-12-11 15:38:05 CET

> (Reducing the file case to the directory case *does* make sense for
> checkouts and updates and commits and statuses. Just not diffs.)
A further perspective ...

The command name carries with it a 27-year expectation of behaviour.
That's a lot of momentum. When program sub-commands use the same name
as system commands, and do mostly the same thing, then you have a
failure4 (IMHO). They should do EXACTLY the same thing, if at all
possible. I think it is possible here.

It is my experience that svn diff or cvs diff or cleartool diff or
any other kind of diff, is generally of more use to a human than to
a program. Yes, it gets used for making patches, but most often in
the development cycle, it is used by programmers who expect things
to behave a certain way. Many many times, I want to compare two
files in a VC system, and many of those times the files are unrelated
from the VC persepctive but very meaningfully related from the
human persective. So from that point of view, I want the tool to
be very dumb, because I am very smart, compared to it. Sometimes :)

Kean

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Received on Wed Dec 11 15:38:23 2002

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