Re: RFC: change 'svn merge' default behavior.

On Thu, 2004-01-15 at 13:12, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> Mike Pilato points out that if diff and merge have different default
> behaviors, it makes it impossible to run diff as a "dry run" for a
> merge.

No, it merely means you have to supply an option to diff to use it as a
"dry run" for a merge, which is not the common case of performing a
diff.

Right now, the closest approximation to that option is
--notice-ancestry; an option to show a real tree diff (in a
yet-to-be-determined format) would of course be better.

> Further, Sander points out that the main time 'svn diff' needs to ignore
> history is when you're comparing unrelated vendor import trees. This
> isn't all that common a use-case... not nearly as common as using 'svn
> diff' for a merge dry-run.

As I recall, one of the big complaints was that "svn diff url-of-file1
url-of-file2" would show a delete-then-add instead of a diff between the
two file contents. So, I would say that at the very least, it's pretty
anti-intuitive to heed ancestry on the top-level target of a diff. (But
that's not the case for a merge.)

> So here's a better proposal, one that I/kfogel/cmpilato like:
>
> * make diff and merge both default to noticing ancestry.
> * rename the existing long option to '--ignore-ancestry'
> * recommend this flag for vendor branching use-cases.

I don't like it, primarily for reasons I expressed in my reply to
Sander.

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Received on Thu Jan 15 19:25:41 2004