[darcs-users] what about removing the unrevert command?

[Eric Kow]

On Sun, Apr 03, 2011 at 14:26:27 +0200, Guillaume Hoffmann wrote:
> - people don't expect it (other VCS don't have it), hence few people
> use it, and most would't miss it

People don't expect cherry picking to be easy either.  I don't think we
should argue from limited imagination.  Transparency and least-surprise
yes, people don't expect to have the feature, maybe not.

> - it would prevent darcs from getting in my way by occasional
> "warning, this will make unrevert impossible" messages

Grumble, that does sound sane.  Alternatively we could do some variant
of just making unrevert impossible

> - it would reduce the number of concepts exposed to the users in the
> manual and in darcs help

No. Unrevert is just the undo of revert

> - it would reduce the codebase, reduce the potential points of failure
> of darcs (search "unrevert" bugs on the bug tracker), improve
> maintainability

Perhaps

> - it would make revert faster (no longer write the unrevert patch when
> doing revert)

Dubious?

> - it would make one item less on Ganesh's rebase Todo list :-)

:-)

> - it could later be replaced by darcs revert -O (even if it's not
> really the same thing)

revert -O requires anticipation and pre-planning.  Unrevert does not.
Part of the magic of Darcs is that you don't have to think ahead so
much (IMHO).

> Arguments against removing it:
> 
> - some people use this feature
> - it's theoretically a nice feature (it's a nice use of patch
> commutation) so it's sad to remove it
> - it's an undo command, and having undo commands is generally nice

From a UI perspective, it's part of the kind of thing that makes Darcs
unique wrt to basically everything being undoable.  Having undo commands
also means not having to have (ah-hah!) confirmation prompts.  Now...
suppose we wanted to keep unrevert... how could we get rid of the
annoying unrevert prompt?

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
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