Re: RCS, again: another removed functionality: undo last-checkin

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Cc: monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
>> Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2015 20:24:39 +0300
>> 
>> On 09/21/2015 08:06 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> 
>> > But what about CVS?  Its "rollback" command does remove the commit
>> > upstream.
>> 
>> CVS has a "rollback" command?
>
> Yes, it does.  From the description of "cvs admin":
>
>   admin options
>   -------------
>
>   [...]
>
>   `-oRANGE'
>        Deletes ("outdates") the revisions given by RANGE.

Yeah, but that is a _repository_ administration option, meaning that
it's not sufficient to have client access.  Also it causes
inconsistencies with the clients' notion of what is in the repo and with
the historic record.  It's in the same class as "renaming files" in CVS,
namely the "when it breaks (and it will), you get to keep the pieces"
category.  Those are operations that can not be rolled back in any
manner (short of restoring from backup).  They just don't belong on key
bindings.

> So is "cvs -o".  The CVS manual says that much.  Why should Git be
> different?  A careful user won't invoke this command unless they know
> what they are doing, right?

I rather doubt that VC should invoke any cvs admin command.  I think VC
should restrict itself to client operations.  There is just too much
potential for damage to map this to standard VC commands (if Emacs wants
to provide specific CVS support outside of the normal VC commands,
that's a different topic).

-- 
David Kastrup