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Re: Feature Ideas

From: Kumaran Santhanam <kumaran_at_tigris.org>
Date: 2003-08-23 17:46:49 CEST

> IIRC, the conclusion was that it would cause more potential grief than
> it would save.
>
> Here's an alternative: svn commit --targets <file>
>
> You can build a wrapper around svn commit that runs "svn status",
> builds you a file list, calls $EDITOR, lets you edit the list, and
> then pulls the list back out and calls svn commit --targets.

Thanks for the info.

While I agree on the use of wrapper scripts in the short-term, I
feel that it's more elegant long-term to integrate useful
features into the SVN client. My reasoning is as follows (this
also goes for the last discussion about external diff programs).

As open-source people, we are all used to hacking on our various
boxen. As such, we are not averse to using external scripts,
aliases, environment variables and the like. A few SH and Perl
scripts don't cause us any concern, and we often write many of
those per week just in the course of our normal work.

In the corporate developer world, the picture is much different.
Many of these folks are running certain non-POSIX operating
systems, and it is uncomfortable for them to deal with external
scripts and wrappers. In fact, they may not even have capable
script interpreters available on their machines. Of course, I
could create a binary that would replace their SVN and pass
through commands, but that's very little difference from updating
SVN itself.

The features I propose are intended to be very minor code changes
that can make a big difference to the user experience. The
easier SVN is to setup and use, the more acceptance it will gain.
Average users are generally resistant to creating custom wrappers
for their favorite tools or functionality. The fewer times they
have to ask "Why can't I do ... ?", the better their perceived
experience will be.

I'd love to hear what others on the list think.

Regards,
Kumaran

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Received on Sat Aug 23 17:47:40 2003

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