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deliberate user unfriendlyness vs training users brains/fingers

From: solo turn <soloturn99_at_yahoo.com>
Date: 2004-01-19 18:22:00 CET

svn seems to get an improving track record in introducing "user-unfriendlyness". there are things
which introduced a less usable style, and there are things where users are forgotten right from
the beginning. examples:

* "svn revert -R" in contrary to "svn blabla -N" in other cases
  svn operates recursively, but not always.
  thanks to svn developers dumb users brains are now trained
  by learning different svn command semantics
  (instead of issueing a warning "really recursive y/n").
  
* issueing help text has to be done explicitely
   $ svnadmin
   Type 'svnadmin help' for usage.

   $ svn ls file:///rep -m ""
   subcommand 'list' doesn't accept option '-m [--message] arg'
   Type 'svn help list' for usage.

  instead of giving the help text directly (case 1), or doing the command
  and issue a warning (case 2), users are trained to retype that command,
  to finally get the help text.

* "svn import" trains users brains by learning that files and directories are
  treated differently:
  $ touch imptest/ts.txt
  $ svn import imptest/ file:///rep -m ""
  Adding imptest/ts.txt
  --> the specified "imptest" is not added, but the contents "ts.txt"
  $ touch ts3.txt
  $ svn import ts3.txt file:///`pwd`/rep/ts3.txt -m ""
  Adding ts3.txt
  --> the specified thing is added.

* accept certificates permanently
  svn developers think that certificates have to be valid,
  and dumb users should annoy dumb server operators to make
  their certificates valid. so there is no option any more
  to store such a certificate.

* paths given with "\" on windows to disallow command-line
  url/path copy paste for svn commands
  new way:
  $ svn st
  U bla\bla\bla.txt
  even in cygwin environment. ther is no copy-paste any more
  to do:
  $ svn somecommand http://server/bla/bla/bla.txt
  
  svn developers think that dumb users on windows anyway do not
  use command line, and if they do, they should learn to type.
  output has to be "pure", maybe there is somebody writing a
  script using this output, and win user does not know
  how to use a "bla/bla/.." path.

* first lock working copy (which can take long) and afterwards ask
  questions if you switch to another window in the meantime you
  risk a session timeout and restart from scratch.

so thank you for the nice training lessons in thinking and typing provided by subversion (R). ok
... i think it had to be said one time before 1.0 is released, and not everything is THAT serious
:))

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Received on Mon Jan 19 18:22:33 2004

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