Re: UI: import can be destructive

On Jul 26, 2005, at 5:46 PM, Chia-liang Kao wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Most of you probably know one of svk's most powerful feature
> is the 'import' that actually imports over existing directory,
> which allows painless vendor branch updating.
>
> However, It can be destructive, consider you might think:
>
>   svk import //project/trunk /tmp/some-other-code
>
> Would import things into //projec/trunk/some-other-code.
> Where as it will kill everything in you trunk and use
> that some-other-code as the current content of trunk.  Bad.
>
>
> So, there are a number of ways to prevent this.  I am wondering
> which once annoys the user the least:
>
> * Make import actually do --check-only, and prints out what it
>   will do.  but when you import a large project, you will see
>   lots of A and will probably ignore the small 'D  trunk'
>
> * Make import ask or stop when there's D happening.  This can
>   be annoying and makes the default behaviour non-deterministic.

> What do people think?

So, I'd like to see svk not import into mirrored paths without a --force

But defaulting to a --check-only style thing sounds sane.  I'm not sure 
what could be done to
1) intuit when things are working right and not get in your way and also
2) stop you when you're about to clobber your entire repository.

This is actually a lot like a problem I run unto with rsync fairly 
often. Depending on the combination of trailing slashes on
paths, incredibly smart and incredibly stupid things can happen. :/

Jesse

> Cheers,
> CLK