David James wrote:
> I still think it would be nice to state in the help text for the
> --pre-1.4-compatible flag that the effect of the flag is to disable
> svndiff1. As Brane pointed out, users might latch onto this flag and
> think it is a complete solution to all of their compatibility problems
> between releases: that's not true, because it only disables svndiff1.
I take it you are referring to BDB compatibility issues here? (That is
the only way in which the flag is *not* a complete solution to
compatibility, right?)
I think that attempting to make the Subversion UI hint at the BDB issue
is not possible to do in a non-confusing way, since BDB mismatches can
cause incompatibility in any circumstance, even when the versions of
Subversion are otherwise identical, which the naive admin would not
expect under any circumstances, however nice we try to make the UI.
> Right now, the help text for the --pre-1.4-compatible flag is somewhat
> redundant: "use format compatible with Subversion versions earlier
> than 1.4". Here's some better help text: "disallow use of SVNDIFF1 in
> on-disk storage, for backwards compatibility with Subversion 1.3.x and
> earlier."
>
> We don't actually need to add "--no-svndiff1" as an alias for
> "--pre-1.4-compatible" -- I think the change in help text is
> sufficient to clarify the purpose of the flag.
To us developers who actually know what svndiff1 is, that might add
clarity, but for the typical user, I don't think it helps at all.
In corroboration, see Jonathan Gilbert's second message in this thread -
I agree with his suggestion that if we mention svndiff at all in the UI
it should be by description, not by name.
Max.
Received on Sun Aug 27 22:48:47 2006