John Peacock wrote:
Thanks for your detailed answer, John.
You seem to be arguing that silently ignoring user errors is better than
imposing the burden of upgrading the client to take advantage of changes.
No: Ignoring erroneous input is a fundamental user interface design flaw.
Many more people will be affected much more often by that than by waiting
for an upgraded client for new keyword support.
Many years ago, rm(1) produced no message when the provided argument
didn't match a filename. It's no accident, comrade, that today's rm
provides feedback on errors. Silently ignored mistakes are hard to
diagnose and bite hard.
With the BSD example, you're really making my point. Yes, the BSD guys
have needs, and yes, you're addressing them, but no, once met, they're not
going to change very much. CVS didn't have configurable keywords that I'm
aware of, and NetBSD has been on CVS for over 10 years.
> If we could come up with a server-distributed configuration
> file, custom keywords would be (at this point) relatively trivial to add
> without having to distribute custom clients.
IMO this is a champagne-and-caviar answer to a beer-and-pretzels problem.
Keyword expansion is not a volatile part of version control. A shared
file is yet something else to configure and support.
Regardless of whether or not this becomes a feature, though, input
validation will still be required.
> > 3. Upgrading the client isn't difficult.
>
> Not so. Some/many people are limited (by corporate policy) to only
> installing packages from a single source (think RedHat Enterprise
> Server), so there is frequently a significant gap between a new core
> release and distro releases.
Honestly, so what? Which organization so constrained *cares* about an
expanded keyword domain? If you say "I use only old, stable, supported
stuff", you accept living without the latest features.
Regards,
--jkl
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Received on 2008-06-25 22:06:24 CEST