Re: getting rid of "P" and fixing "M" (was: Checksum failure: serious problem or not?)

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Tuesday, December 23, 2003 at 01:34:19 (-0500), Larry Jones wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Checksum failure: serious problem or not?
>
> Jim.Hyslop writes:
> > 
> > Well, even in local mode the client must have some knowledge of how to do a
> > merge, otherwise it could never merge a modified file.
> 
> The server does the merge, not the client.  In local mode, you're
> essentially using the server directly (without a client).

I _think_ he meant how the client deals with "merging" of the new
changes being pulled from the repository, and he shouldn't have said
"modified file".  Either the whole local working file gets replaced
("U") with what the server sends, or the server sends a patch which gets
applied ("P") to the unchanged local working file.  "M" is of course
what we see when a modified working file is updated with a merge of
local and repository changes.

It's just that the user really doesn't need to know this, and _never_
did.  I.e. showing the user the difference in some hope he or she would
appreciate the performance improvment when doing a normal update was a
counter-productive feature the day it was added and we've been answering
needless questions about it ever since.  There was even talk of removing
it shortly after it was added, but sadly it didn't happen then.

I.e. if you add up all the time wasted answering these needless
questions about "P" vs. "U", then not only could this have been fixed
long ago with no cost, many other far more useful features might even
have found time to be worked on.  Hindight is 20/20, but this is
certainly a case of "we knew this would happen" if there ever was one.

If there was ever any client operation during "cvs update" that the user
might want to distinguish it's the difference between "M file" when the
file has been locally modified and "M file" when repository changes have
been successfully merged into the local file.  If the stupid "P" had
never been for "updated local unmodified file with a patch" I would have
long ago suggested it be used for "patched locally file with changes
from the repository", but now we're stuck with the stupid useless
meaning of "P" and conflicing meanings for "M" and no meaningful
character that I can think of to separate the latter.

BTW, Merry Giftmas everyone!  :-)

-- 
                                                Greg A. Woods

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