Re: Removing rollback from VC mode - request for comment

[Karl Fogel]

address@hidden (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>Rollback is a case in point.  It is a command that lets you undo the
>last checkin.  Only SCCS and RCS actually support it.  Git possibly 
>could, in theory, but the Git implementation would be tricky and have 
>sharp edges when the last revision had been pushed.

The above is about reverting the most recent checkin, but...

>2. VC in particular, and version-control systems in general, have
>moved towards a philosophy of making history destruction difficult.
>Old school, saving disk space was important enough that removing
>deltas was actually done as an economy measure.  New school, making 
>it difficult for the user to shoot self in foot is a higher virtue.
>
>The argument against this is simply that someone, somewhere out there,
>might be using it on some remnant RCS repo (I think we can safely
>consider SCCS dead to us at this point).  And the broader question is
>whether that possibility is a dealbreaker.

...this sounds more like the elimination of older revisions (i.e., not 
necessarily removing the last revision, but rather eliding/collapsing older 
revisions so that some contiguous series of past commits get folded into one 
commit in history).

You're only talking about the former, though, right?

If so, Git supports it quite well (as long as one hasn't pushed the change 
upstream somewhere, that is, but that's not necessarily VC's responsibility to 
notice).  So offering it for the git backend shouldn't be a problem...

However, if it's too much hair to support, +1 on removing it.

Best,
­K