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

From: Brian W. Fitzpatrick <fitz_at_red-bean.com>
Date: 2006-01-13 23:20:49 CET

On Jan 13, 2006, at 2:36 PM, Greg Hudson wrote:

> 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.

Agreed.

>> 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.

Fair enough. But I still think that the "I screwed up my last commit
and want to revert it" use case stands.

> 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.

Hm. I wonder what p4 and clearcase do in this situation... anyone?

-Fitz

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Received on Fri Jan 13 23:31:08 2006

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