Multiple undo again...

Didly didlybom at gmail.com
Fri Jun 4 18:08:04 CDT 2010


On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 9:54 PM, Jason Harris <jason at jasonfharris.com> wrote:

>
> I still feel its sometimes too easy to stuff up. Just see the other recent
> thread a couple of minutes ago, about patch queues and possible data loss.
> Basically, I want to be able to undo more than one time. Thats the goal.
>
> How its implemented is of course secondary...  So the question is do you
> not even want that goal of being able to undo a couple of operations, or its
> just that having an environment variable HGDIRNAME is of no interest to you?
> Its cool if it isn't... :)
>


As an intermediate mercurial user, perhaps I can give you guys the
perspective of someone who is the type of user that may be interested in the
feature that Jason is trying to provide...

I believe that I am an intermediate mercurial user because I feel that I
know my way around the basic, core commands and that I understand what
Mercurial is doing most of the time. When I use the core mercurial commands
(e.g. pull, commit, push, update, merge) I know that there is basically no
risk because you cannot lose history. So even if I screw up there is always
a way to fix the problem

However I have more trouble with some of the more "dangerous", history
editing extensions (transplant, mq, etc). When I need to use them I often
know what I want to do, but I am unsure of what the extension will actually
do! While I try to avoid using those commands, sometimes I just must use
them. In those cases I am often afraid that I will make a serious mistake
from which I won't be able to recover (perhaps because I don't know how). To
avoid those mistakes I often end up making a copy (not even a clone) of the
full repo before executing those dangerous commands, just in case.

In this context I can totally see the appeal of what Jason seems to be
trying to achieve with his multiple undo feature. I can't tell whether his
approach is technically sound or not but I can fully understand the spirit
of what he wants to do.

As we say in my home town "A knife cuts the expert and the amateur hand
equally deep". It seems to me that Jason wants to provide an steel glove to
avoid getting seriously hurt while using those sharp knifes that come with
Mercurial.

Just my 0.02$!

Angel
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