On 10/5/11 2:19 AM, Eric wrote:
On Wed, October 5, 2011 6:14 am, Matt Welland wrote:
...
Every time pragmatism loses to philosophy someone, somewhere, is gonna get
screwed.
But "pragmatic" decisions made by someone who doesn't understand the
philosophy/principles/rules can also cause problems,
Sure, but come on. It's a version control system, and the idea I'm
talking about is "never delete anything". This isn't a particularly
heavy philosophy, nor are we treading on particularly new ground. It's
an idea that, in daily practice, has some irritating consequences (and
the occasional list chatter seems to indicate this, too). And besides,
Fossil's already made one acknowledgment that, if it's
spam/unwanted/etc, you can delete it, it just doesn't make it easy. I'd
just suggest that it could be made easier for other use cases
(accidentally-checked-in password file, etc) as well, even if it
remained officially discouraged.
It is noble to have a philosophy of "don't rewrite history" but only to an
extent. Some obvious and perhaps not so obvious examples have been
mentioned
in this thread.
"Those who rewrite history are condemned to repeat it" perhaps.
I'm not trying to be snarky, but I'm having a bit of trouble following
how this familiar aphorism apply here. Are you saying that, if I
accidentally committed a password file, and wanted to delete it from my
and all other repos, if Fossil let me, then I might accidentally do so
again later? But if I had to shun it and then chase down all the other
repos and shun it from them all, then I wouldn't?
I think fossil has a nice balance here. It is possible to remove stuff but
it takes a little effort. Never deleting stuff is just silly. An record of
the past that stores irrelevant data is quite likely less useful than a
record that has been cautiously cleaned up.
Define "irrelevant", including how you can be absolutely sure that it
applies to any particular case.
I'm also not sure why it would be necessary to present a universal
definition of "irrelevant". How about, instead: Fossil's a good
program already but it has one non-technical limitation that causes some
occasional friction in use, which has inspired at least one inelegant
workaround (export to git, modify, import from git). Or I'd try, we're
probably mostly professionals who use the software daily, and we're
generally good at what we do but because we're also human, we still make
mistakes from time to time, and the software could be more forgiving in
helping us fix those?
Don't get me wrong, I use fossil on a near-daily basis and I'm generally
quite pleased with it. But I also don't think it's a mature program or
has finished its development, and I'd just like to toss my two cents in
as a mostly-satisfied user, about where I think it could be further
improved.
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