I'm running this by folks on darcs-users, to get a bit more feedback. I'm leaning towards adding an "obliterate" alias for unpull, a change that I've staunchly opposed in the past. I seem to recall that most users would be in favor of this change, but wanted to run it by folks just in case there were people who silently agreed with me, who would oppose this change.
If you could make sure to cc [EMAIL PROTECTED] on your replies (unless you go off-topic, perhaps), that would be great, so we'd have the conversation there in the bug report (in case we decide not to go with this change). David On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 11:41:20AM -0400, Ian Lynagh via RT wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Wed Jul 27 13:44:48 2005]: > > Hi, > > > > I'm a new darcs user. darcs is very cool. At least 3 times now I've > > been confused because I needed to unpull, but hadn't pulled anything. > > Maybe you should change the name. The name "unpull" was intended to keep people from mistakenly using the command who don't fully understand what it does, since it's the most dangerous command in darcs. If you pulled a patch, then it *is* safe to unpull it (because you could always pull it again--unless you pulled it from a temporary repository...). And in fact, if you pulled a patch, unpull precisely undoes that pull (except if there were conflict markings, but that's another issue). You never actually need to unpull, since unrecord followed by revert is identical when there are no local changes. If there are local changes, then record -a, unrecord, revert -a, unrecord would have same effect as unpull. And this is what I'd want a newbie to do--if they work in this manner, they are unlikely to accidentally lose their changes. > A number of people seem to be confused by this. Perhaps we should add an > alias? > > I can't remember if any possibilities have been proposed before. I think > something like "destroy" has the right feeling of danger. "obliterate" > too, and is a cooler word IMO :-) Both obliterate and destroy have been suggested before. Many of my objections to this renaming have been to the fact that those who wanted to rename unpull usually wanted to rename unrecord to match, which I feel makes the mistake of making a safe and an unsafe command too similar in name. Of course, the same objections apply to unrecord (that you can unrecord a patch you never recorded), but I suspect that unrecording patches made by someone else is very rare, while unpulling your own patches is pretty common. I think I'd be all right with obliterate. Obliterate is indeed a cooler word, and is sufficiently rarely used in computer terminology that I doubt people would have preconceptions about what exactly it does. This would be our first alias (or command with two names) so it would definitely require some though. I think I'd rather keep the unpull name (not that you suggested otherwise), which means we'd have to figure out how to make the documentation clear. We'd also want to have the same implementation for both commands, but they should prompt "Should I unpull/obliterate this patch" according to the command by which they were called. -- David Roundy http://www.darcs.net _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.abridgegame.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
