[PATCH] revert: allow configuring the .orig file location

Durham Goode durham at fb.com
Wed Aug 12 12:00:29 CDT 2015


On 8/12/15 8:09 AM, Augie Fackler wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 12:25 AM, Durham Goode <durham at fb.com> wrote:
>> On 8/11/15 1:02 PM, Augie Fackler wrote:
>>> On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 09:07:13PM -0700, Zainab Zahid wrote:
>>>> # HG changeset patch
>>>> # User Zainab Zahid <zzahid at fb.com>
>>>> # Date 1438967257 25200
>>>> #      Fri Aug 07 10:07:37 2015 -0700
>>>> # Node ID 92707bacbef0292af14701d0e812cbbf7239f754
>>>> # Parent  eabba9c75061254ff62827f92df0f32491c74b3d
>>>> revert: allow configuring the .orig file location
>>> Why? Is having .orig in ignores insufficient?
>>>
>>> (I'm -0 on this patch because I can't think of a VCS tool that offers
>>> it, and everyone's been fine with that for the past N decades...)
>> We get lots of complaints that .orig files mess with tools, IDE's, greps,
>> etc.  It seems straight forward enough to dump them elsewhere.
> As a fraction of users, how bad is this? If it's 1% of your userbase
> or some other low level, I'm inclined to tell them to suck it up, as
> every feature introduces some extra maintenance complexity. Have you
> pointed them to 'hg revert --no-backup'?
It's not a large percentage, but then again, the majority of users don't 
give any feedback at all.  When they ask "why can't we just put the orig 
files somewhere else", me answering "suck it up" or "because it adds 
complexity" is kind of an embarrassing response for me for a relatively 
simple issue.

Also, part of what I'm trying to do is set up Mercurial so that the 
defaults (for our users at least) result in the fewest questions for 
us.  This is just one of a number of nagging issues that cause 
questions, and the questions really add up when you onboard hundreds of 
new people each month. This particular case is one where the solution 
has zero downsides for the user, and trivial downsides for us hg developers.

In addition, --no-backup isn't really great since they do want backups, 
just not in their working copy. In fact, I think the refactor this patch 
does (of moving the .orig path creation logic somewhere central) is 
something we want anyway. This way we can reuse that logic elsewhere 
(like in hg update -C, so it wouldn't lose data either).


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