On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 10:07:18PM -0400, C. Michael Pilato wrote: > On 06/20/2012 01:25 PM, Stefan Sperling wrote: > >> (Sorry if the above reads like a cranky old-timer putting the brakes on > >> progress -- I trust you know that's not my intent.) > > > > But it doesn't help much to say something like this without also suggesting > > a viable alternative. I would love to see Julian move forward with this > > work and am looking forward to learning how far it could get us. > > I agree that it doesn't help as much as you or I would like. Still, I'd > like to think that you'd appreciate my pointing out that the petroleum I see > dripping from beneath your car might be a reason to avoid driving it, even > when I lack the mechanical know-how to prescribe a more specific solution. > :-)
Yes, I should have phrased this differently. Sorry. I didn't mean to say that you weren't allowed to raise your concerns. I meant to say that I think we shouldn't discourage Julian from following down this path. I must have read a subtext in your comment that wasn't actually there. Your comments are actually very valuable since they prevent us from being mislead into a situation where subtree merging stops working for users who are relying on it. > I too would love to see Julian move forward with this work, and I don't want > to be a voice of discouragement for that effort. It's just the moving > backward that bothers me. Error messages communicate to users that they're > doing something wrong, but they aren't. Support for subtree mergeinfo and > cherry picking are a documented part of Subversion's merge tracking feature. Agreed. Ideally, the symmetric merge will support all currently supported use cases, without throwing errors at users or requiring new command-line switches. I haven't yet made up my mind about interim measures for 1.8 though. I suppose if symmetric merge won't support all currently supported use cases in 1.8, we could keep the --symmetric option in place for 1.8, and drop it in 1.9 or later once the symmetric merge code can handle all use cases?
