Karl Chen wrote:
> To support something like "diff 5 changes before revision 123
> against 10 changes before revision 678" we'd need a more general
> syntax. Here's another suggestion:
>
> svn diff -r 123~5:678~10 foo.txt
[... and other suggestions.]
We're still not quite connecting. Your suggestions are all perfectly
reasonable as syntax ideas, but it is easy to produce ideas for new features.
The difficult but more important part is deciding what functionality is useful.
For instance, I haven't found a need to be able to express requests like
"diff 5 changes before revision 123 against 10 changes before revision 678", so
there's no point in inventing syntaxes for it unless such a need is first
demonstrated.
Imagine you go and write the code to support all of your ideas so far, after we
agree which syntax is going to be used for each meaning. Imagine you do that
tomorrow, and send us the patches. Which patches should we apply to make
Subversion a better product? If we apply one of them, of course it gives
Subversion an extension in its capabilities which is, at first sight, an
improvement. But will that extension make it actually more difficult to use,
to learn, to maintain, in the long run, outweighing the benefit it gives?
Those are the questions that need to be answered, and really there is not much
point in spending much time on syntax or implementation details without such
analysis.
- Julian
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Received on Thu Nov 3 15:49:35 2005