kfogel@collab.net wrote:
> Julian Foad <julianfoad@btopenworld.com> writes:
>
>>1. Do we really want this to throw an error? People may have scripts
>>that rely on it succeeding.
>
> True, though in general we've taken the attitude that it's okay to
> break scripts that depend on a buggy behavior (unless it would cause
> dataloss in some obvious way, of course).
Yes - if we decide that silently accepting a delete of a non-existent item was
a bug, then we can fix it.
>>2. Where are we going to write down our policy on whether a command
>>like this should throw an error or a warning? It's obvious that we
>>need to, since the question crops up over and over again.
>
> (Note: whatever we consense on will go into hacking.html, of course.)
I'm sure there's a better place to define the user interface to the
command-line client, but that'll do for now.
> Here's a policy proposal:
>
> "A Subversion command should, by default, error when asked to do
> something that it cannot do (e.g., remove a non-existent file).
> Here, "error" means both display a message on stderr and return
> non-success. However, it is acceptable for some commands to not
> error in this circumstance, iff passed the '--force' flag. This
> is a convenience for scripts that don't need to bother with
> sophisticated error handling."
>
> Thoughts?
That seems contrary to what I recall as many recent changes in favour of
skipping over a non-existent target with a warning.
- Julian
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Received on Tue Dec 13 15:53:59 2005