[svn.haxx.se] · SVN Dev · SVN Users · SVN Org · TSVN Dev · TSVN Users · Subclipse Dev · Subclipse Users · this month's index

Re: [PATCH] --reverse option to invert -c/--change

From: Greg Hudson <ghudson_at_MIT.EDU>
Date: 2006-01-13 21:36:16 CET

On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 14:23 -0600, Brian W. Fitzpatrick wrote:
> > (Yeah, I know, "svn merge -c N --reverse" to roll back a change. I
> > don't think rollbacks are all that common.)
[...]
> I think that if we made it easier ('-c REV' is the first step in that
> direction, '-c NEGATIVE_REV' is another huge step in that direction),
> then we'd see people rolling back very often.

I disagree that there's a frequent call for rollback, but we can't
settle that on the dev list.

> BTW, one use case for rolling back is the desire to commit something
> that I wrote but don't want to use in my code *at this moment*: I
> commit the patch with an appropriate log message, then I roll it back
> right away.

That may be a use case, but it doesn't seem like a terribly good one.
"svn cp . branch-url" is the preferred way of recording changes without
corrupting the mainline.

If we ever get a highly-intelligent merge algorithm which supports
convergence, this kind of "commit and then immediately revert" operation
may confuse it. One of the problems intelligent merge operations have
is trying to figure out why you reverted a change: did you just not want
the change *yet*, or did you not want it *at all*? So it can have
trouble figuring out what to do with the graph:

  A --> B --> A
    --> B

If you reverted B in the first line because you didn't want the change
yet, then you want the result to be B. If you reverted it because you
decided the change was a bad idea, then you want the result to be A.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Fri Jan 13 21:56:38 2006

This is an archived mail posted to the Subversion Dev mailing list.

This site is subject to the Apache Privacy Policy and the Apache Public Forum Archive Policy.