Hey Mike,
That's a terrible story and I think anyone who's ever accidentally deleted a
file that was valuable can feel for you.
I completely agree with your sentiments that SVN is:
a) pretty rough to use at the start for beginners (the whole roots in CVS
thing...)
b) could be much more helpful when things "start going wrong" like in your
add/delete sequence
The problem is that it's basically designed for fairly skilled use by
professional developers and I've found it's quite hard to explain the
concepts and interfaces to others who don't have that background. The good
news is it's a great tool once you figure your way around it, but there's
definitely room for improvement in the interface.
Sorry to hear about your mishap,
Doug
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Goetze [mailto:mgoetze@mgoetze.net]
Sent: Monday, April 17, 2006 1:52 PM
To: users@subversion.tigris.org
Subject: How Subversion drove me to shoot myself in the foot.
Hi,
I just started using Subversion, and am posting this so that hopefully, some
day, it will come with a default behaviour which will prevent what happened
to me happening to someone else.
I decided that it's time to sync my home directories across various
machines, and settled on Subversion as a relatively mature piece of software
likely suited to the purpose. So I read the first 6 chapters of the
Subversion book, and set up a repository.
I added the first few directories with only the slight problems associated
with adding the .ssh directory via svn+ssh. 2 Revisions without problems.
Then I decided to add a directory with a bunch of LaTeX files in it. So I
did an "svn add" on the directory. Well, the it occured to me that I could
trash the .aux and .log files before committing, as they hardly need to be
remembered, so I did that. Oops...
I guess I wasn't supposed to that that. "svn revert" did nothing, since I
hadn't changed any files already managed in the repository. "svn commit", of
course, didn't work either, since it was missing files. "svn add"ing again?
Already under version control! Well, guess I'll have to use "svn delete"...
after all, the book reassured me quite nicely that "svn delete" never
actually deletes anything, it just gets removed from the next revision. Add
it, remove it again, nothing changes, and I can start over again, right?
However, "svn delete" refused to work... couldn't get a lock. So I did "svn
cleanup" and "svn delete" again... nope, still not working. Well, I don't
need a lock, I just want to get it out of the system. So "svn --force
delete" and then start again.
Oops.
So I just deleted a year's worth of .tex files, permanently. Even though the
Book assured me that "svn delete" never deletes anything permanently. Right
now, I'm pretty angry, mainly at myself, but this episode hasn't exactly
instilled a lot of faith in Subversion's ability to keep my data safe in me.
:(
So please, make "svn commit" do something smart when it notices that added
files aren't there anymore, because this really sucks.
Regards,
Michael
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Received on Tue Apr 18 19:34:58 2006