Re: cvsimport still not working with cvsnt

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 14, 2011, 21:49 UTC
Message-ID: <7v8vynnokt.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20110114074449.GA11175@burratino>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> and recommended erroring out if both files exist to make this easier
> to diagnose.
>
> Emil's advice: if this is an important use case to you, maybe it would
> be served better by looking at both files?

Thanks for summarizing two-year's worth of discussion ;-)

Trying both, one after another, in the order that likely favors newer one over the older one, is a very valid option but is appropriate only under a very narrow condition. Picking a wrong one must reliably, silently _and_ quickly fail, and fail without any side effect. The one in .cvspass may identify you as a different user from the user .cvs/cvspass identifies you as, and the two users may have different capabilities or default server side preferences--in such a case, both may succeed, but in a different and unexpected way [*1*].

As the general principle, in a "we see two, and we cannot tell which one the user wants to use" situation like this, I tend to prefer erroring out to _force_ the user to fix the configuration once and for all.

Unless the "try both" approach is reasonable, we could implement "we read from one and when we find one we stop, otherwise we read from the other" and document the order, but it is probably less friendly than the above two options.

[Footnote]

*1* I know .cvspass is a bad example for this, as it records the password for the <pserver you are trying to connect to, your user on the server> tuple. Once you get in, what you can do is exactly the same because you are authenticating as the same user, but think of a case like .ssh/config that is indexed by "Host" and allows you to use "User" to