"John M. Black" <johnmblack_at_gmail.com> writes:
> Yes, but we should always have usability in mind for the average user. I had
> no idea about "globs", and even if I did RTFM, I'd find them extremely
> cumbersome. An otherwise user-friendly feature like Ignore shouldn't have a
> complex syntax to attain what is probably the 80% use case. Everyone
> understands simple wildcard syntax.
>
> Many of us here are comfortable with these kinds of syntaxes b/c we grew up on
> command lines, but remember that this feature also drives the Tortoise UI,
> whose users are not so technical. I opened this suggestion here after hearing
> this complaint from many others in our company that aren't techies and use
> Tortoise.
>
> Do any of you use Ignore for patterns that are not simple file extensions?
> (that's an honest question.)
Most of my patterns are extension-based: "*.foo" and the like. A few
are explicit filenames, but I certainly agree that extensions are the
common case.
You know, one solution here could be that Tortoise translates the
patterns for the user. You enter "*.txt", but Tortoise turns that into
"*.[tT][xX][tT]" on the way to Subversion. (The delightful fact that
Tortoise internally would then have a regexp to match a globbing pattern
is a bonus.)
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I like this. The svn
libraries should continue to offer what they offer now, which is maximum
control, so that those few who want case-sensitivity can at least get
it. Meanwhile, each client that *uses* those libraries can decide what
actually works best for its users. The command-line client would
probably not translate, since its users are likely to know about
globbing. But Tortoise can and, IMHO, should translate, because its
users a) generally don't know about globs, and b) are accustomed to a
case-insensitive environment anyway.
Thoughts?
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe_at_subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help_at_subversion.tigris.org
Received on 2008-03-23 06:14:50 CET