Special revision ids: HEAD, BASE, etc. ... but Head, head, CHANGED, FIRST?

I am concerned that the implementation of special revision ids may go beyond what is useful and what is documented. I am not concerned about the amount of code or execution time, but about the maintenance cost if people start to depend on these things unnecessarily.

subversion/libsvn_subr/opt.c (revision_from_word) implements the following familiar words:

  HEAD
  BASE
  COMMITTED
  PREV

but also these:

  CHANGED: a synonym for COMMITTED

Do we really need that?

  FIRST: a synonym for 0 (number zero)

Do we really need that? I can imagine a meaning of "FIRST" that would be more useful: "The first revision in which the item existed."

It allows them to be specified in any mixture of upper and lower case:

  HEAD head Head hEaD

Do we really need that? I checked in the source code of CVS; it only allows upper case, and Subversion's documentation always specifies upper case.

My opinion, if you haven't guessed, is that none of these are useful. Sure, case insensitivity save you from having to press the SHIFT key, and CHANGED saves two key strokes over COMMITTED, but I don't think those are good enough reasons. But maybe there are other reasons, like compatibility with some other system.

- Julian

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Received on Sun Sep 21 00:25:56 2003