Mark Phippard wrote:
> Julian Foad wrote:
>> Jörg Rebenstorf wrote:
>> [...]
>> > The new access option should update the working copy of the primary
>> > target "PATH..." and its externals to a certain inter-repository
>> > consistent state, that is, to update the primary target and all of its
>> > externals content to their appropriate version at a certain point in
>> > time.
>> > The new access method shall be an additional command-line option, for
>> > example "--sync-externals", for the svn client tool's update command
>> > like:
>
> Why do we even need to introduce a new option here? What would be
> controversial about just doing this automatically (for externals from the
> same repository that do not specify a revision in the external)?
>
> Isn't this just the expected and desired behavior?
Hi, Mark.
I don't think we can claim that the existing behaviour has been
obviously and totally wrong all along, and just change it. It gave
logical and predictable results, just not the results we think most
people would expect or want. People will have got used to it, and
while it's easy to imagine many cases where that's not desired, I can
also imagine there are many cases where that's now being relied on.
When something we designed clearly could never have been useful, then
we can call it a bug and change it, but that's not the case here.
Also, for people who *do* want this new behaviour all the time, they
will have been working around the issue in the past. But this
proposal, not least because of the uncertainty of date specifications,
isn't a totally uncontroversially correct fix in all cases, and so
isn't necessarily going to give the identical results those people
have been achieving in all cases. I suggest that that too is an
argument against just changing it.
Personally, I'd love to see a cleaned-up UI, but the older Subversion
gets the more important it is to preserve quirks so as not to hurt
existing users (including those using scripts).
Is that sufficiently persuasive? It's just my opinion.
- Julian
Received on 2015-08-26 16:42:50 CEST