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

From: Julian Foad <julianfoad_at_btopenworld.com>
Date: 2003-09-30 14:28:04 CEST

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."

Removed "FIRST" and "CHANGED" in r7250.

> 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.

I have left case-insensitivity in there, because the respondents were equally divided for and against it.

- Julian

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Received on Tue Sep 30 14:27:30 2003

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