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Re: Subversion file name restriction

From: Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de>
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:07:40 +0100

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 10:25:22AM +0100, Andreas Schweigstill wrote:
> > As I said previously I've read the book once a few years ago, but
> > forgot the small details. Thus I didn't see any point in rereading the
> > documentation every year, just to keep up with the "fine prints"...
>
> It is not neccessary to read the book once a year but prior to write
> questions to the mailing list.

The trick is to know what to look for in the book.

I knew to look for "peg revision" and quickly found the relevant
section of text in the book (within a couple of seconds).
To know what to look for you need experience with the tool,
and experience with looking up answers to questions in the Subverison
book (know how the book is structured, etc.). Which implies that,
when you look up the first few answers, it will take you a bit
longer, but once you've done it a few times you become much quicker.

> > If the same issue keeps popping up every once in a while, then it
> > means that the problem in question raises from counter-intuitive
> > behavior of the tool. So maybe the tool should be enhanced so that if
> > a user uses a `@` in the file name and there is an error, a suggestion
> > should be printed.
>
> Subversion is used in lots of shell scripts and makefiles, so it would
> be highly risky to change it's behaviour.

I'd rather tune the command line for interactive use than for scripts.
We have stable APIs scripts can use.

Which does not mean having the client ask the user lots of questions.
But suggestions in error messages can help a lot to help users understand
potentially confusing behaviour. For example, Mercurial developers have
done a very good job at this. Mercurial can be learned very quickly
because of little helpful non-obtrusive hints they place into the output.

Stefan

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Received on 2009-11-23 11:08:37 CET

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