On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 10:32 AM, Chad Perrin <c...@apotheon.net> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 05:04:52PM -0700, Matt Welland wrote:
> >
> > This is the classical divide between pragmatists (I want to get my job
> with
> > with minimal pain so I can go home a play ball with my son) versus the
> > idealists (source code management means doing x, y and z and no more and
> no
> > less and I'm sorry that it will take you twice as long to do your job
> right
> > *grin*).
> >
> > Fossil is caught between the messy world of the pragmatists and the nice
> > tidy world of the idealists. There is no one right way to do it. One
> group
> > or the other will be disappointed.
>
> I don't think that's all there is to it.  It isn't really fair to those
> who prefer automation of the full set of rm tasks to suggest they
> necessarily lack a sense of the idea, or to those who oppose that
> automation to suggest they lack a sense of pragmatism.  I think that the
> two sides of this discussion are more sophisticated and complex than
> that, with several different types of argument being possible and
> presented on each side.  The major argument types I have seen so far are:
>
>      for rm automation                | against rm automation
>     ----------------------------------|----------------------------------
>      idealist (Unix way)              | idealists (airbags way)
>      pragamtists (POLS way)           | pragmatists (backward compat)
>      trolls (haven't noticed any)     | trolls (NIH and "you're dumb")
>
> If you know of any trollish argument forms on the pro-automation side,
> please feel free to point them out.  I may be suffering some confirmation
> bias in this case.  Anyway, my explanations of the various arguments, as
> I have noticed them, follow.
>
> * Unix way idealists: When you tell it to do something, it damned well
>   does it.
>
> * airbags way idealists: When you tell it to do something that might be
>   accidentally applied in an unintentionally destructive manner by an
>   incautious user, it should second-guess your intentions and try to
>   convince you to do things differently, on the assumption that is not
>   what you wanted.
>
> * POLS pragmatists: When you issue a command that seems like it should
>   perform a given task, you expect it to perform the whole task, and not
>   only part of it.  Tool design should account for that.
>
> * backward compat pragmatists: This is how it has been done so far,
>   establishing a set of expectations particular to long-time users and
>   the automation scripts they have written that rely on the behavior in
>   question.  We should not change the tool's behavior to violate those
>   ingrained expectations because there may be backward incompatibility
>   problems.
>
> * NIH trolls: You're trying to turn Fossil into Git!  Stop it!
>
> * "you're dumb" trolls: Obviously you are all too stupid to understand
>   the benefits of keeping things the way they are.  You are wrong because
>   you are stupid; you are stupid because you disagree with me.
>
> If we could eliminate those "troll" category participants in the
> discussion, I think we would get a lot further in sorting this out.
>

Nice analysis Chad!

My sincere apologies to anyone insulted by my overly simplistic and
arguably unfair comment :)

I still want one of these two:

Preferred behavior: remove file silently from disk iff the file is
controlled and unchanged or if forced with -f. Issue a warning if the file
was not removed.

Also works for me: don't remove files unless forced with -f. With force all
removals on disk happen without any notice.

--
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]

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