[issue2235] default behaviour of update shoul not be merge

[Peter Arrenbrecht]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 5:20 PM, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
> The point of this rant: I really wish more of the core developers
> would internalize "backwards compatibility matters" because I'm
> getting really worn out being the only one carrying this flag.

Matt, sorry, I'll try to keep it in mind. That said, please allow me:
<rant> It's hard to always keep old, complex installations in mind
when most day-to-day business is with noobs shooting themselves in
their feet. I, in fact, have no personal experience with a Mercurial
setup involving lots of complex scripts around it. The one thing that
most resembles something complex like that is pbranch, which did get
broken recently by the merge ancestor change. I do realize that was a
tad more important than a flag to update, but it does happen to
influence my view of the stability of hg's behaviour. This particular
change cost me about 4 days to work around and continues to bite
me.</rant>

> That said, that doesn't mean we can't improve hg. For instance, if we
> sit down and think about all the ways that the current update command
> is broken, we can gather those all into a new command with better
> behavior and migrate to it over time (though the old command will
> obviously stay around forever). For one thing, the name could be
> better: n00bs routinely can't figure out that you can check out -old-
> versions with update.

This is much appreciated. While reading your rant, something as silly
as a "hgg" tool - where we could start over - actually entered my
mind. The proposal, after all, was in the direction of making hg less
suprising. Meaning it was actually targeted at making this SCM inspire
more trust.

-parren