Markus Schaber wrote (in thread "controversial issues in the tracker"): > * 2491 Add --dry-run flag to "svn update" client command > http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2491 > > There already was a patch submitted by Arwin Arni 2011 and discussed on the > list, but it was not applied due to objections. > > The first controversial issue was of conceptual nature: This functionality > somehow duplicates the semantics of "svn status -u" - on the other > hand, "svn status -u" is known to not exactly give the desired > semantics in some cases - especially, it can only tell about the existence of > incoming changes, but not whether they're actually produce a conflict. > > The second issue was more of an implementation issue - the patch spreads a > lot > of if()-branches in the code. Some developers would have preferred cleaner > code > by creating a separate editor driver. However, this will result in a bunch of > duplicate code, which needs to be kept in sync (or the "--dry-run" > mode will not match what the real update will perform. There is already a > precedence for merge --dry-run. > > See also the lengthy discussion at > http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2011-03/index.shtml#63 > > My personal opinion is that it is an useful feature, so we should try to > agree > on a way of implementing it. On the other hand, given that the provided patch > does not cover some corner cases, it may actually not be "bite-sized". > :-)
I think we *should* have a dry-run mode but it's not simple to do, so I would leave the issue open. (Even better than a dry-run mode would be the ability to undo after running an update -- but that requires something like "stash" support which is not available yet.) - Julian
