> At 1:17 PM -0700 5/18/07, Jared Hardy wrote:
> >I find any such attempts to "save the user from themselves"
> >simultaneously amusing and frustrating. If you're so afraid of typos,
> >why not add an "Are you sure? (y/n)" message after each and every
> >command that creates anything new?? ;P
> > If users are intelligent enough to be using the command-line
> >client in the first place, then they're probably also intelligent
> >enough to clean up after their own mistakes.
>
On 5/18/07, Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> wrote:
> IMO, it's not just a question of saving a user from themselves, but:
>
> Q: How many times do I "need" some parent directories automatically
> created for me?
> a: Very few times (speaking for me personally)
>
> Q: How many times do I make a typo in some parent-directory name,
> while trying to create a single new directory in an already-
> existing directory?
> a: Much more often. Not that I make a lot of typos, but that does
> happen more often than I need to create multiple levels of
> directories in a single command.
>
> Q: For the two possible behaviors, which is more annoying to me when
> I want the "not-chosen" behavior but get the chosen behavior?
> a: It's not annoying (to me) to re-enter a command and add '-p' to
> it. It's much more annoying if a bunch of extra directories were
> created due to a typo, and now I have to get rid of them all.
All good points. I guess I had my own set of use case assumptions,
different from these. I use copy'n'paste and auto-complete features
(like tab in bash) extensively, to avoid typos. Most of my
command-line use is also in the form of scripts, which use file
browser shells or "svk info" parsers to generate or convert path names
for me, so I end up having a lot of "-p" lines in these scripts. I
guess I also create deep directory structures far more frequently than
"normal" users. :)
Your usage patterns make a good case for having some form of "pwd"
tracking in subversion clients, and "svn cd repo/path" commands. That
discussion should probably move to the thread suggesting there should
be an SVN "console mode"...
Something in the history of all that is Posix must have lead to
"-p" not being the default in mkdir and cp, so I guess I'll bow to
that. Anyway, I guess my vote, if --parents isn't on by default, would
be to add the "-p" shorthand, since I do use it so often. "-P" would
also be acceptable. Using both "-p" and "-P" might be best. I must
admit, I didn't find it likely that it would become the default
behavior, but I thought it was worth debate. One of my devil's
advocate moments I suppose. I wonder if there's been any public
surveys about "mkdir -p" or "cp -P" usage patterns in the wild?
:) Jred
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Received on Sat May 19 06:48:12 2007