Re: Cogito nit: cg-update should default to "origin".

From: David A. Wheeler <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>
Date: Apr 28, 2005, 03:57 UTC
Message-ID: <42705F3C.1000208@dwheeler.com>
In-Reply-To: <20050428005337.GA3422@pasky.ji.cz>

I said:

>>Minor nit on Cogito: I think cg-update should default to "origin",
>>not the head, if you leave it unspecified. ... The origin seems (to me)
>>to be a MUCH more common situation (and thus the better default).

Petr Baudis replied:

> Actually, I wasn't too happy with the current update-to-HEAD special
> case...

Sounds like we're in agreement! Once the special case goes
away, cg-update in both concept & code essentially becomes:
  cg-pull ${1:-origin} && cg-merge
which has the wonderful advantage of being really, really
easy to explain.  ("cg-update ALWAYS pulls, then merges").

 > I think people do this cg-update without arguments so seldom
 > that changing this now shouldn't hurt much, right?

Absolutely!  Indeed, I find myself doing:
  cg-update {wait for something to happen} {oops} cg-update origin

> What about moving this special case
> to something like
> 	cg-restore
> and changing the defaulting of update and pull back to 'origin'?

...

> Another thing is to UI-wise maintain clear difference between cg-cancel
> and cg-restore. Do you think the names are distinctive enough? Any
> better naming ideas?

Good names for these operations seem to be tough to find. "cg-cancel" seems odd anyway; you'd think you could "cancel" a commit and then the commit would stop existing (not true!).

I looked at a thesaurus; other options to cancel & restore include: revert, recover, retrieve, reclaim, reclaim, undo. You could even use the names cg-recover-deleted to recover deleted files (what cg-update does now without parameters), and use cg-cancel-edits or cg-cancel-changes to make clearer commands. But in the end I have a different idea, hold on...

elsewhere Dan Holmsand said:
 >How about making the restore thing a special case of cg-cancel instead?
 >"Restore deleted files", and "restore deleted and modified files and
 >unseek" are similar enough that people will now where to look.
 >Something like "cg-cancel -C" (for careful), that only restores deleted
 >files would do it, I think.

There's a big risk of not including the "-C" and suddenly losing everthing. Since there's NO way to recover these files, a somewhat safer interface would probably be a better idea. But merging the concepts may make sense if we can find a single command name that would help people figure this out.

How about "cg-revert" or "cg-restore"? The word "revert" is even in the comments for cg-cancel, but now it makes sense to "revert" or "restore" the existence of a file (whereas it's really odd to "cancel" a file deletion).

A serious problem with cg-cancel (and previous cg-undo) is big data loss, no recovery, of your recent work.... if it's going to have less & more drastic operations, I'd sure hate for the drastic operation to be the default. There's also missing functionality currently: often I want to revert to the unedited state for just a single file, or just restore a single file. So, how about this:

cg-revert [FILE...] or
cg-revert [-d|--deleted]|[-a|--all]
   Reverts some/all files back to the HEAD's state, eliminating changes

   If given a list of 1 or more files, this reverts just the named files
   to the HEAD state. If they were deleted, they are restored;
   if they were edited, their edits are PERMANENTLY LOST.
   If they haven't changed, nothing changes and there is no error.

   If given -d or --deleted, it reverts all deleted files.
   If given -a or --all, it reverts all files
   (everything), resuling in loss of all edits and removals.

How's that for a reasonable UI, replacing both cg-cancel and cg-update's current no-parameter functionality?

--- David A. Wheeler