On Mar 4, 2006, at 6:16 AM, Jim Correia wrote:
> Preserving the extra data on a safe-save or a save as requires
> extra work.
Oh, I agree, in fact, I think these two saves *should* remove any
extra information in the document.
> I tend to agree with Mike's point
Mike's original point seemed to be that it was absurd for a user to
make a RFE that the developer's product preserve subversion data. In
fact, Mike seemed to feel that by suggesting such a request, the
original poster was "(I'm trying to think of a nice way to put this)
-- right out" indicating that if Mike had spoken more freely, he
would have had some choice insults not suitable for prime time about
the mental facilities of the poster. I think that is what caused such
a visceral response on my part. I stand by the response that the
request is reasonable (although, like any RFE, it may not be
practical to implement and needs to be weighed against other
development considerations, e.g., the amount of effort required to
rewrite I/O routines and the likelihood of introducing errors in that
work). However, "please preserve extra data in your documents" is
certainly more reasonable than some of the requests that I've seen
(e.g., "please provide backward compatibility for my Mac SE/30
running System 7, oh, and can you provide the product on a floppy").
I guess part of the question is whose document is it? (Read at least
the next three sentences before responding.) The document does not
belong to the developer's application (or the developer), it belongs
to the user. If the user wants to write all sorts of crap into the
document, they should certainly be allowed to do that. It is
reasonable for the developer to respond to this by saying, "hey look,
you wrote all sorts of crap into the document, of course our product
won't read it any more". (Okay, that was the third sentence). This
doesn't make it unreasonable for the user to ask (politely) that the
application preserve the crap. The user certainly can't demand that
the product handle the crap, nor can the user claim the product is
broken/defective if it doesn't handle the crap. That's why I
suggested that this should be placed in the "Request for Enhancement"
category, not the "Bug" category. The user is just asking the
developer to add a new feature to the product that will extend its
usefulness (for this particular user) beyond the current design. That
sounds like a reasonable request to me, but again, that doesn't mean
that I would run out and implement it.
> this is a Subversion problem to solve.
I agree that Subversion should provide a solution.
Aaron
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Sat Mar 4 19:42:47 2006