Re: vc-cvs-global-switches and -f

[Andre Spiegel <spiegel@gnu.org>]

On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 05:51 +0200, Juanma Barranquero wrote:

> Let's put it other way: even on normal situation, it seems safer to
> make VC *not* use customized defaults it knows nothing about (and
> which can cause trouble), and let the user who uses a .cvsrc and knows
> what he's doing to put a simple
> 
>   (setq vc-cvs-global-switches nil)
> 
> on their .emacs.

If we put implementation issues aside for the moment, I think the
following behaviour would be desirable for VC:

(1) Settings from .cvsrc should be effective during VC commands, unless
    a particular VC command would not work with that setting, in 
    which case VC must override it

(2) Customizations that the user makes inside Emacs should override
    settings in .cvsrc.  In some cases, it may be good or tolerable to 
    see a warning message if the settings are inconsistent, e.g. in 
    your case where Emacs and .cvsrc don't agree on the diff format.

(3) Generally, users who customize VC settings or who create .cvsrc 
    files can be considered advanced users, and they can be bothered 
    with some effort to make sure that both kinds of settings are
    consistent.

Given this, I don't like the idea of making "-f" the default in VC,
because it violates (1).

A real solution would require something along the lines of Stefan's
parsing of .cvsrc from within Emacs.  Stefan, do you see a possibility
that VC could use your code from pcvs.el to do this?

However, given that we are in a feature freeze, and given (3), and given
the fact that this is a rather exotic situation, I don't think we should
change anything right now.