Re: Auto-subst of repository roots (was Re: svn diff branch woprking copy against mainline?)

On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 05:19 +0000, Julian Foad wrote:
> Daniel,
>
> I did say in my last mail:
> > I'm not saying we shouldn't do the "+" thing, I'm just asking for more concrete data.
>
> And you are giving more data. Thank you. You sound very frustrated - which I
> can understand

Yes, but you didn't receive 5 emails from what must be random lurkers on
dev@, not copied back to the list, saying "Oh, just use the shell!. Use
the shell! SHELL SHELL SHELL SHELL SHELL".

Personally, i think saying "use the shell" misses the point entirely.

We could script pretty much everything, and turn svn's command line into
probably 5 or less commands.

You don't need diff, you've got export, cat, and /usr/bin/diff!
Just script it!

Users don't want to be scripting a lot of things. When it's not going
to cost us much to make it so they don't have to, and it's incredibly
frustrating to them otherwise, we shouldn't tell them to script it. Am
i advocating we add 700 commands to svn to cover every conceivable case?
No.
This is probably *the second most common use case for diff and merge*.
Not something 6 people do once every three years.

It's one thing when it's some major design issue. But we are talking
about something no other VCS has a problem doing, which is retyping the
repository root again and again, for simple commands people do every
day.

Telling people to use the shell to do things you *should be doing for
them* is like arguing over the theoretical niceness of some solution
that sucks in practice. When it comes down to it, it makes no difference
how easy or simple it is, or how elegant it is, because it sucks in
practice, and real everyday use is what really matters.

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Received on Thu Nov 3 17:03:59 2005