On Thu, 29 May 2003, Michael Wood wrote:
> On Tue, May 27, 2003 at 02:59:03PM -0500, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> > Faheem Mitha <faheem@email.unc.edu> writes:
> >
> > > However, would it not be better to not commit the change if you
> > > realise while you are writing the log message in the editor (say)
> > > that you don't want to commit?
> >
> > Then quit the editor abnormally without saving changes; svn gives you
> > a chance to abort the commit. Someone just pointed that out.
>
> Unfortunately I have a habit of saving often. If you start writing the
> message and save before continuing, you might forget you have saved and
> just exit the editor, thinking it will abort the commit. Of course it's
> still possible to commit a reverse changeset and patch up the log
> message, though. I wouldn't want Subversion to ask every time you've
> exited your editor if you really want to commit. I'm also not sure this
> should be an option.
Ok, but there are (at least) two ways of handling this other than adding
this option, both suggested elsewhere on this thread.
1) Currently `svn commit' exits if the log file is not modified. This
amounts to a blank log message. However, it does not parse the file to see
whether the log message is actually whitespace or not. If it did parse the
file, and gave the option for aborting, then it would be easy for someone
who changes his/her mind about the commit to simply remove the log
message, converting it into white space. It is obviously difficult to
revert the file back to its original untouched form.
This behaviour would be consistent with current behaviour (an extension of
it, actually) and would not involve adding any new preferences. Of course,
it would mean more code to debug etc. I'm not sure what the other
downsides would be.
2) Using Mark Grosberg's patch. I'm not trying to reopen discussion on
this, since it has already been discussed extensively elsewhere. See the
long thread beginning
http://subversion.tigris.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgId=254414
However, I'd just like to say I *really* like this feature, and among
other things it trivially deals with the above issue, namely, just delete
all the files and nothing will be committed.
My impression is that nothing has been decided about this patch, though a
number of people have expressed positive feelings about it. I hope it will
go in eventually. It is a great user interface feature.
> > > Let me just ask, what is the downside to my suggestion? As I said
> > > already, this could be made a configurable option, so experts and such
> > > who don't want to bother with it don't have to.
> >
> > Greg Hudson sent a mail over the weekend that very eloquently
> > explained that there's no such thing as "just another option". Adding
> > options is expensive, especially in terms of supporting and
> > debugging. That's the downside.
>
> Havoc Pennington has also written about this:
>
> http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html
>
> See the "The Question of Preferences" section.
Hmm. He makes some good points. However, I still like GNU emacs. :-)
Faheem.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Thu May 29 22:07:40 2003