Julian
I would like to politely disagree.
Currently subversion may use FIRST as a revision zero synonym. But it
can easily have other applications. If it's part of the dictionary, why
lose it - it can easily be used for the first revision in which a
particular file appeared.
Second, the case insensitivity is not worth removing.
I don't know about you, but it's so desperately unnerving when you have
to talk to a computer like it's a complete illiterate slob and can't
figure out that the case of a command doesn't matter.
At least in the old Cobol days, case didn't matter because the computer
translated what you typed into upper case.
If we go and strip the case insentivity for keywords, I seriously feel
that we're taking an immense step backwards for the sake of
'compatibilty' with a system that we are trying to supercede.
We should encompass CVS. Not just be compatible w/ it.
We should be able to do more. Not just emulate it's command line
idiosyncracies.
So that's my two cents. If we start stripping things out just because
"that's how CVS does it", then I say, what the heck, let's just do w/o
subversion.
Shamim Islam
BA BS
On Sat, 2003-09-20 at 18:26, Julian Foad wrote:
> 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 01:41:03 2003