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List:       subversion-dev
Subject:    Issue 777 resolved? ("'svn log' bombs out if any arg is unversioned")
From:       Julian Foad <julianfoad () btopenworld ! com>
Date:       2003-08-31 21:53:34
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I have been looking for open issues that are easy to close.

Issue 777 says "'svn log' bombs out if any arg is unversioned".  The original problem \
was that it bombed out SILENTLY, but that has been resolved - it throws an error.  \
The issue is still open, with the observation that it would be nice if it got logs \
for all the versioned arguments.  While that might be nice, there is little point in \
changing it without also bringing into line the other subcommands which have similar \
behaviour.

1. I would suggest either the issue be closed as "resolved", or expanded in scope to \
"subcommands need to treat unversioned-file arguments in a consistent manner".  Would \
you like me to do one of these?

2. (The subject of the rest of this message.)  Any opinions on what the most \
appropriate behaviour is and whether the same behaviour can be appropriate for all or \
most subcommands?

It may get a little complicated - there are lots of variations like file doesn't \
exist in WC, doesn't exist in repository, doesn't exist in the specified revision but \
does in HEAD, etc.  Nevertheless it is probably easy to generalise, saying something \
like "every subcommand shall process each valid argument and give a warning for each \
invalid argument".

At the bottom there is a summary of the present behaviour of many subcommands.

I would say that processing only some of the valid files (e.g. those before an \
uncontrolled file but not those after it) is bad behaviour: it can be hard to recover \
from that.  The two sensible options seem to be:

  (a) Process each valid file and give a warning for each invalid file.

  (b) If any file is invalid, abort with an error (that mentions at least one of the \
invalid files) without processing any files.

Option (a) is probably easy to impliment once we agree an appropriate form of \
notification.  Option (b) is surely the cleanest and best way, but requires checking \
every argument before starting, which may be inefficient or something.

Note that while "svn commit" is atomic, this only means that it has to commit all or \
none of the valid files; it could be made to commit all valid files but reject \
invalid ones.  That's probably not acceptably safe - but it's a possibility.

The idea was mentioned in issue 777 of each API function returning a list of the \
arguments that it failed to operate on.  That sounds nasty to me, although in the \
abstract sense it is equivalent to printing a warning for each failure.  Hmmm.

Of course it is not essential to have this cleaned up for release 1.0, but ... well \
... you know, it's sub-optimal, as someone used to say a lot.

What I would want to do for a start is to get all the error and warning messages \
consistent, and make each subcommand process either all valid files or no valid files \
(whichever seems easier for that particular subcommand).  Any strong views (apart \
from "Work on one of the really important but difficult bugs instead!")?

- Julian


Here is a summary of the present behaviour of several subcommands.  "A" and "Z" are \
controlled files; "U" is an uncontrolled file.

Summary:                Processes:  Error/warning:
svn cat A U Z           A - -       'U' has no URL
svn commit A U Z        - - -       Can't find an entry [...] /home/[...]/U
svn delete A U Z        A - -       'U' is not under revision control
svn diff A U Z          A - -       'U' is not a versioned resource
svn info A U Z          A - Z       U:  (Not a versioned resource)
svn list A U Z          A - -       'U' has no URL
svn log A U Z           - - -       'U' is not under revision control
svn proplist A U Z      A - Z       warning: 'U' -- not a versioned resource
svn propset ... A U Z   A - -       'U' -- not a versioned resource
svn resolved A U Z      A - Z       warning: Not under version control: 'U'
svn revert A U Z        A - -       warning: 'U' is not a versioned resource
svn update A U Z        A - Z       warning: 'U' is not a versioned resource




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