On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Stefan Sperling <s...@elego.de> wrote: > On Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 12:59:43PM +0100, Johan Corveleyn wrote: >> Given what I said above, this can't be done in general (not if you >> give two URLs or two wc paths, because then both synopsis 1 and 2 are >> possible -- it would obviously break backwards compatibility if we >> would now start erroring out on these, while these used to work fine >> with automatically picking usage 1 before). Only if one of them is a >> URL and the other a WC path, because we give an error message then >> anyway. > > I think Alexey meant only the cases where we currently error out, i.e. where > exactly two targets are given and one is a path and the other is a URL. > > I didn't realise this but there is indeed no ambiguity in allowing this > syntax as a shorthand for a corresponding '--old X --new Y' diff invocation. > > Thanks Alexey, see http://svn.apache.org/r1442640 > Making these invocations produce a diff instead of an error makes things > less surprising for users.
Hmm, okay, but I would have preferred some more discussion before you implemented this. It's not clear to me that this decreases the surprises. I can perfectly imagine just as many questions being asked on users@ with the question: "Why does 'svn diff left.txt right.txt' give me an empty diff, while 'svn diff ^/left.txt right.txt' does the right thing?" I think it would be better to consistently point users to the --old/--new syntax, so as to educate users more (so I'm okay with the change in the error message), not hide it even more from them. Speaking of the error message: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 5:24 PM, Stefan Sperling <s...@elego.de> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 04, 2013 at 04:39:32PM -0800, Alexey Neyman wrote: >> What adds oil to the fire is that the error message, which claims that >> "Target >> lists to diff may not contain both working copy paths and URL". If instead it >> said that the supplied syntax is ambiguous and suggested to use --new/--old >> for disambiguation, this would have saved a lot of frustration and would >> eliminate the need of "svn compare" subcommand :) >> >> For example: >> svn: Ambiguous target list (contains both work copy paths and URLs). Use >> --old/--new syntax to disambiguate. > > Agreed. The error message wasn't very helpful. > I've improved it in http://svn.apache.org/r1442645 based on your suggestion. > Thanks! How is this useful after r1442640? Seems to me we should either improve the error message (which would be my preferred option) *or* make 'svn diff' handle these automatically as a shorthand syntax (hence no error message). But not both. Or am I missing something? -- Johan
