Re: Why do commands fail when a file is unknown to svn?

Nicolás Lichtmaier wrote:

> Besides, SVN doesn't complain when trying to commit an up-to-date
> file... according to you.. shoud that be changed? I think that's a
> similar case.

Not at all; the up-to-date file is already known, but it doesn't need anything
done to it, so this is a guaranteed harmless state. Trying to commit a file
which doesn't already exist in the repository is not always completely harmless.

Either:

1) The file _should_ be in the repository, so by erroring out, you can add it
and then commit it along with the other files in this changeset;

2) The file _shouldn't_ be in the repository, in which case your selection of
files on the command line was in error.

Just because you _could_ do something in CVS doesn't make that behavior better;
I suspect this was probably a conscious choice to raise this to an error instead
of a warning (to prevent case #1 above). There are probably a number of things
in CVS which people got used to using due to laziness, rather than it being a
good feature.

That being said, you could request an enhancement to warn on unknown files
(--warn-unknown???) instead of erroring out. It's also quite easy to write a
little script to construct the appropriate commandline.

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite H
Lanham, MD  20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5748
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