Re: svn up: ask if keep deleted, or restore?

solo turn wrote:
>
> do you collect user feedback somehow?

We welcome user feedback, preferably on the "users@" mailing list. A summary of it might later be entered in the issue tracker if it turns out to be a likely candidate for future work, or else it might be added to the documentation if that seems appropriate.

> an option of keeping deleted files deleted would be nice. currently, the only way of deleting
> files is "svn rm". if you delete files from the explorer, like you are used to, "svn up" restores
> them from the text base.
>
> why this could be a problem?
> you do not call "svn edit" to edit a file, you just use your file editor as you always did. and
> "svn up" does not restore the files. some of our users think there should be the same schema with
> file deletions. they want to use the filemanager as they always did.

A very interesting observation. It would be very easy to respond with "The user should learn to use the version control system," but in this case I think I agree with those users.

If I delete the content of a file, and then "svn update", then Subversion will not add the content back in (except for any new lines that have appeared in the repository's copy since the previous update). If I delete the whole file, but haven't got around to issuing "svn delete" yet, and then I update, I would consider it somewhat rude and inconsistent of Subversion to restore the file.

(If the file were missing because the WC was incomplete, then of course it should be created, but that is an entirely different matter and presumably the text base would have been missing too.)

I don't see this as a very strong issue, nor one that needs to be configurable, but it is worth considering. At the moment I can't think of a convincing use case for the present behaviour. Providing an easy way to revert a file is no argument, because we have a command for doing that, but maybe that was the original reason for it, before "svn revert" existed. Can anyone shed more light on it?

- Julian

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Received on Wed Mar 17 15:49:28 2004