Re: RCS, again: another removed functionality: undo last-checkin

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > > Like it's been said, 'rcs rollback' removes a revision from history 
 > > (right?). 'git revert' doesn't.
 > 
 > Because it's impossible.  But it does the closest thing possible.

Of course it's possible to remove commits in git, including in a
publicly-accessible repository.  It is often unwise, but it's
possible, and sometimes a very good idea (as in Lilypond's "staging"
branch).

 > The idea of the proposal, namely, call 'revert' when 'reset' followed
 > by 'push' would fail, was to avoid the failure.

Users prefer a "true" rollback for several reasons.  One of the most
important is that the rolled-back commit causes a bisect "bad" result
(build or test failure, depending on the bisection criterion).  If
maintaining a "bisect-clean" branch is what you want, "revert" is the
wrong thing.

The probability the DWIM results in "Do What I Didn't Mean" here is
way too high.  If you want to do "revert" but call it "rollback", go
right ahead.  But don't do "reset" sometimes and "revert" in others.