Re: Considering teaching plumbing to users harmful

[Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 02:51:30PM -0400, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> 
> svn avoids these excess merges by default, albeit because it puts your
> working copy at risk every time you do "svn update".

You can do "git pull --rebase" if you like. And there is a configuration
option that allows you to avoid typing --rebase every time. Or did you
mean to being to do that without saving your changes? I think the later
is really a bogus idea, and it should not be encouraged. The worst than
that can be only say "svn update" while you still have not saved changes
in your editor. Then you will have even more fun. So the rule should be:
save your changes first, and only then pull from the upstream.

BTW, one thing is to avoid excessive merges, and the other thing is to
do not have this feature at all. SVN is still not capable to merge,
because merge means to have more than one parent. SVN cannot do that.
What SVN does instead is very limited and buggy cherry-picking:
http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2897

In fact, this is not cherry-picking patches but per-file cherry-picking
and due to limitations of their automatic revision filtering, they have
a nice feature -- to edit svn:mergeinfo manually. Obviously, it is
impossible to visualize this per-file property well. Thus when you are
going to merge something in SVN, you have no slightest idea what you are
really doing.

Have fun,
Dmitry