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List:       subversion-issues
Subject:    =?UTF-8?B?W0lzc3VlIDE1NDldICBGZWVkYmFjayBmcm9tICJjbGVhbnVwIiBhbg==?=
From:       sussman () tigris ! org
Date:       2004-03-26 2:07:21
Message-ID: 20040326020721.24758.qmail () tigris ! org
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http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1549






------- Additional comments from sussman@tigris.org Thu Mar 25 18:07:21 -0800 2004 -------
I don't agree at all.  Long ago, Jim Blandy persuaded me that software should be
less chatty, not more chatty.  If there's nothing to do (or nothing was done),
then print nothing.  Don't *say* that you did nothing.

We're already following the less-blab principle in other ways:  for example, if
you type 'svn Eou3weLRo', we don't get pages of help text:  we see one line that
tells the user to run 'svn help'.  If we run 'svn status' and there's nothing
interesting about the working copy, nothing is printed.  Likewise, if we run
'svn revert' or 'svn cleanup' and nothing happens, nothing is printed.  There's
a consistency to the silence:  "only describe what you're doing, not what you're
*not* doing."


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