On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 01:40:42PM -0400, John Peacock wrote:
> Stefan Sperling wrote:
> > Evidence seems to suggest the contrary.
> > We've changed the default output before:
> >
> > Although we try hard to keep output from the command line programs
> > compatible between releases, new information sometimes has to be added.
> > This can break scripts that rely on the exact format of the output.
> > http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.6_releasenotes.html
> > http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.5_releasenotes.html
> >
> > Although the Subversion developers try hard to keep output from the
> > command line programs compatible between releases, new information
> > sometimes has to be added.
> > http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.4_releasenotes.html
> > http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.3_releasenotes.html
> >
> > I don't think we should be restricting our options of improving the
> > CLI just because we might be breaking scripts we don't control.
>
> Those were all major releases where significant information was added.
> It wasn't possible to avoid changing the output.
I would not argue that a summary of conflicts and different indentation
for 'svn proplist' were unavoidable, to me these were just nicer than
what we had before.
But fair enough.
> This feature would be very useful in many circumstances, but is
> basically eye-candy IMNSHO. It doesn't contain any new information, but
> rather gives the user a nicer experience.
Yes! And the nicer experience is why we want it.
> I suppose we could try to
> have it default to ON if the process has a tty and OFF otherwise (which
> should deal with scripting), but knowing how the Subversion client
> libraries are designed, that information may be two or more call sites
> removed from where you'd want to know.
Yes, that problem rings a bell.
Well, I'll reiterate my point anyway, maybe explaining my reasoning
a bit better this time around:
If we don't have the eye candy on by default, most people won't see
it, because they either won't know that it exists or won't be bothered
to enable it. So why add it in the first place? Hao Zhang might as
well spend his time on something more worthwhile in this case.
If we show the eye candy by default, and have a switch to turn it off,
then those people who will have a nicer experience will get it without
having to jump through hoops, and script writers who don't want it
can add a --quiet or --non-interactive or --no-progress-report or
--whatever-you-wanna-call-it switch to their scripts and be done with it.
I also suspect that the first set of people (interactive CLI users)
is larger than the second (script writers parsing CLI output), so
more people will benefit if we have it enabled by default.
Stefan
Received on 2009-03-26 23:14:14 CET