Johan Corveleyn wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 8:55 PM, Paul Burba wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 2:33 PM, Johan Corveleyn wrote:
>>> At the risk of getting something thrown at me: after reading
>>> Julian's arguments, I was thinking "svn:recursive-ignore" might
>>> be a better name. It doesn't sound as global, and it does
>>> adequately describe what it does as opposed to svn:ignore.
>>> (except if it doesn't ... not entirely sure if "recursive" is
>>> accurate for the current behavior).
>>
>> I suspect that "svn:recursive-ignore" will find disfavor for the
>> same reason my original "svn:inheritable-ignores" did: Nobody
>> embraced the
>> idea of explicitly declaring the property as inheritable (or
>> recursive) as part of its name. Just replace "inheritable" with
>> "recursive" in this thread and you'll see what I mean:
>> http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2012-11/0005.shtml
The argument about not calling it 'recursive-foo' works well for the 'svn:auto-props' case: the point is that the name describes the main function and the fact that it's recursive is a minor detail. But that argument doesn't work at all when we have two versions of a property
and the distinction between them is precisely that one is
non-inheritable and the other is inheritable. Then indicating that distinction in the name is entirely appropriate.
> Yeah, sorry I didn't participate in that thread. But I don't actually
> agree that it's the same (though you could be right about the similar
> dislike by others ... don't know). The term "recursive" sounds to
> me more like it describes the behavior of the ignore pattern (like
> '**/*.py' would to me also indicate a recursive pattern). While
> "inheritable" is more an implementation detail of the props mechanism
> that we use for that.
>
> So to me, "recursive" sounds a lot like "global" (unlike
> "inheritable"), except that it's not global but only effective in
> that subtree.
>
> But I'm not a native English speaker, so I could be wrong in the
> "sounds a lot like" area ... and I'm late in the bikeshedding game
> anyway ... so not pushing for anything :-) ...
I agree with Johan that 'recursive' sounds more intuitive than 'inheritable' (largely because we already use 'recursive' in the UI and docs), and also more appropriate than 'global'. On the other hand, 'global' is shorter and is the name used in the config file, which would help people to recognize it even though it's not quite the same scope. Overall I'd call it a draw. The world could just as easily get used to either name.
- Julian
Received on 2012-11-06 22:09:46 CET