Re: [PATCH] cg-seek should not complain if run twice

[Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>]

  Hello,

Dear diary, on Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 07:03:35AM CET, I got a letter
where Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org> said that...
> Quoting Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>:
> 
> > It seems cleaner to just make cg-seek fail with a sensible error message
> > if it's already unseeked.
> 
> I don't like this.  What if "cvs up -A" would fail if run twice?  What if
> cg-clean would fail if there was nothing to clean?  What if sync would fail if
> it didn't cause a single disk write?  Idempotent operations are easier to work
> with.  Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idempotent_(software)
> 
> I could make an exception for the case when the command invocation indicates
> that the user is unaware of something, and that it would endanger the user's
> data.  But it's not the case for cg-seek without arguments on non-seeked
> repository.  The intention is clear, and the knowledge of the current state of
> the repository doesn't matter, since there will be no merge or something.

  I have my reservations to this argumentation in the specific cg-seek
case, but it's very subjective, unclear, and I personally really don't
care. So let it be your way. ;-)

  Thanks for your opinion,

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
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