Should commit take --depth?

Should commit accept all possible values of --depth?

Right now, commit takes -N. The purpose of that is to allow someone
to commit a property change on a directory without committing changes
to files or subtrees under that directory.

(Most other commands treat -N like --depth=files, but commit is
special: 'svn commit -N DIR' doesn't commit modified files in DIR, it
just commits any propchanges on DIR. This is not what you'd expect
from reading svn_client_commit4()'s doc string, which currently says:
"If @a recurse is false, subdirectories of directories in @a targets
will be ignored". My testing indicates that that doc string is just
mistaken, and I'll fix it appropriately depending on the outcome of
this thread.)

Let's consider what full --depth behavior might look like for commits:

   --depth=empty: Like today's -N.

   --depth=files: Like depth=empty, plus also commits any modified
        files directly inside a named directory target.

   --depth=immediates: Like depth=files, plus commits propchanges on
        any subdirectories of a named directory target.

   --depth=infinity: Full recursion, the default.

Now the $64,000 question: are depth=files and depth=immediates really
useful? I can see use cases for depth=empty and depth=infinity, but
what would we really gain by supporting the other two?

If we decide not to support them, this is what I'm planning to do:

   * Make --depth=empty a (preferred) synonym for -N

   * Make --depth=files and --depth=immediates print errors explaining
     that they are not supported.

   * Accept --depth=infinity (just behave like the default).

   * Fix the doc string for svn_client_commit4(), and maybe change its
     'recurse' parameter to 'prop_changes_only' or something, so it
     describes its effect more accurately.

Thoughts?

-Karl

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Received on Sun Jul 1 09:43:13 2007