Re: prevent accidental use of "Ignore ancestry"

On 1/27/2017 9:22 PM, Stefan Küng wrote:
> On 27.01.2017 13:32, Stefan Hett wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> This issue occurs, if some developer mistakenly (by accident) clicks the
>> "ignore ancestry" checkbox in th TSVN merge dialog and doesn't recognize
>> his mistake. This seems to be quite easy to happen (for us it happened
>> to three different developers in the past year).
>>
>> [..]
> I'm not sure about such a second dialog. It seems too much for too
> little gain.
> And "Advanced..." buttons as well as "expert mode" and the like just
> don't work, because everyone thinks they're an expert or know the
> advanced stuff even if they aren't experts or don't know what an option
> does.
> So all that dialog would do is to have users click more to still do what
> they shouldn't :)
>
> But that's just my opinion - let's wait what others have to say about this.
>
> Stefan
Thanks for taking the time to reply, Stefan.

Just to emphasize my point: I don't think you can (and therefore even
shouldn't) try to prevent people/developers from intentionally setting
this switch, since this certainly can't be done (there's always a way to
break things intentionally, unless you sacrifice functionality).
The only point I think should be done is to prevent accidental
activation of this setting (or at least to make it harder to do so by
accident).
Certainly there are multiple ways to do that (adding a sub menu was just
my initial idea).

The thing with the positioning, naming and functionality of this option
is two-fold IMO:
1. It's not clear to the usual developer what activating the setting
really means. Most developers not aware of it's functionality just might
realize that activating it will prevent a merge to fail (or conflict).
It's not imminent to them that they might have done something "dangerous".
2. The positioning of the setting (right above the line-ending handling
settings) implies to the unknown user that it's just some simple (not
really dangerous) setting he can tweak to only impact his particular
merge and how its treated.

I hope I get my point a bit better through, now. :-)

That said, other improvements I can think of:
- just move the Ignore ancestry setting to the section below (above
"Force the merge" but below the separator line) -> at least that would
solve the second point mentioned above
- add a warning icon with a mouse-over popup pointing to the TSVN
documentation explaining the setting and its implications to emphasize
it's nothing one should do without knowing what he does
- make it a two-state button (or 3 single-selection buttons: "do not
ignore ancestry (default), ignore ancestry, always ignore ancestry)
where ignore ancestry would be reset to the default once the dialog has
been closed (that way at least keeping the setting accidentally active
all the time could be prevented, if the developer wanted to activate it
only for his current merge)

-- 
Regards,
Stefan Hett
------------------------------------------------------
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4061&dsMessageId=3205734
To unsubscribe from this discussion, e-mail: [users-unsubscribe_at_tortoisesvn.tigris.org].