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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 > I suggest that people (1) make a new VC command for undo-last-checking,
 > perhaps with a different name to move it out of the way, the (2) implement
 > it on whichever backends they can.

The question is how many such commands do we need.  In most VCSes, it
is hard[1] to actually remove commits, and the only thing that can be
done is to apply a reversed patch (git calls this "revert").  In
others, there is a command to remove commits from a branch (git calls
it "reset", and it's nondestructive; Mercurial calls it "strip", and
it seems to be destructive).

However, resetting a published branch is likely to cause all kinds of
trouble when others pull and merge the reset branch with their own
branches, and Eli suggests a third, DWIMish approach, which is to
reset if the branch isn't public and to revert if it is.

Footnotes: 
[1]  You may need admin privileges or the like, or access to the
repository host, etc.