Re: Preventing mistakenly deleting branch tags

[Donald Sharp]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2001 at 07:09:18AM -0700, Stephen Cameron wrote:
> 
> --- Donald Sharp <sharpd@cisco.com> wrote:
> regarding my patch about deleting branch tags.
> 
> > This doesn't stop people from pulling the trigger.  It just makes
> > it annoying and the user will definately figure it out.
> > 
> [...]
> Yeah, my intent was only to help prevent accidental deletion of branch tags.
> If a misguided user is bent on deleting a branch tag, my patch wouldn't stop
> them.  Extending your analogy, my patch is like a safety switch on a gun.

Except it only stops one tiny little misbehaviour on the users part.
Do you really want to add a new command line switch for every tag'ing
issue you would like to restrict?

> 
> I'm not too interested in extending it to something complicated involving
> figuring out what user is running, etc, simply because deleting a branch tag 
> is
> a pretty questionable action no matter what user is running.  The thing to do
> would probably be make sure that all documentation explaining "cvs tag -d -b"
> indicates what a horribly bad idea actually using it is, so that when the user
> does figure it out, he also figures out he doesn't want to do it.
> 
> That, or forbid moving branch tags altogether, (except via "cvs admin -n"...I
> think it can be used to delete any tag you care to delete.)
> 
> Hmm, it occurs to me that "cvs tag -F" which can move a tag should probably be
> a bit wary of moving branch tags too.  I've had novice users in the past 
> commit

This makes my point for me.  are you going to add another command line 
switch to the process to control this action?

It's better to define a certain class of commands that we don't
want ordinary cvs users to do.

donald
> files to a branch, then do something very very bad, like this:
> 
> cvs tag -F branch_tag foo.c   
> 
> thinking they needed to "promote" the new revision to get it into the build, 
> or
> whatever.  This converts "branch_tag" into a non-branch tag, and this can go
> unnoticed for quite awhile because it doesn't really break things right away. 
> Eventually, someone notices they can't commit foo.c on branch_tag anymore, or
> whatever other problem surfaces, and you have to go back and manually fix it.
> 
> If I make "cvs tag -d" wary of branch tags, I probably should make "cvs tag 
> -F"
> wary as well.
> 
> -- steve
> 
> 
> 
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