Re: Property values for boolean properties.

"true" and "false" are literals in several programming languages (including
scripting) and could possibly be considered familiar enough to transcend
differences in spoken language. Of course I barely speak one language let
alone several so perhaps someone for whom English is not their first
language should comment.

Do "+" and "-" better avoid the language issue? Are people of other spoken
languages familiar enough with the include/exclude connotations of these
symbols.

Beyond these I think you are possibly stuck with the status quo of presence
and non-presence as being the next best thing.

I have to agree though that setting it to "off", "false" or "no" and having
it be interpreted as "on" is a bug not a feature.

--
Talden
On 6/18/07, Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com> wrote:
>
> Subversion has two versioned properties interpreted as booleans --
> 'svn:executable' and 'svn:needs-lock'.  (I'm ignoring 'svn:special'
> here, since users don't touch it directly.)
>
> Their property values are always normalized to "*", no matter what
> value you actually gave.  Thus:
>
>    $ svn propset svn:needs-lock "StrawberryFieldsForever" artwork.jpg
>    $ svn proplist -v artwork.jpg
>    Properties on 'artwork.jpg':
>      svn:needs-lock : *
>    $
>
> This presents users with the conundrum of what property value to use.
> Since you can use anything and it won't matter, what *should* you use?
> In practice, we often seem to recommend the word "on", for example:
>
>    $ svn propset svn:executable ON somescript
>    property 'svn:executable' set on 'somescript'
>    (from http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.ref.svn.c.propset.html
> )
>
> But the problem is that the word "off" doesn't turn the property off;
> instead, "off" turns it on too!  You have to use 'svn propdel' to turn
> the property off.
>
> I'm not sure what we can do about this.  Obviously, "off" doesn't mean
> "off" in all languages, and we wouldn't normally want potentially
> scripted command-line client behaviors to depend on the locale.  On
> the other hand, "off" and "no" are widely-known English words, and the
> rest of the command-line client interface depends on English words.
> So we could have
>
>    svn propset on  artwork.jpg  -->  sets the property
>    svn propset yes artwork.jpg  -->  sets the property
>
>    svn propset off artwork.jpg  -->  deletes the property
>    svn propset no  artwork.jpg  -->  deletes the property
>
> ...with the second two being special cases.
>
> Yes, yes, I realize that's lame.  Thoughts?  Creative solutions?
> Should we just live with it, and try to find another word besides
> "on" to use in our examples?
>
> -Karl
>
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