[darcs-users] Re: [darcs #473] "unpull": I do not think it means what you think it means

[Thomas Zander]

On Saturday 30 July 2005 13:58, David Roundy wrote:
> > > I'm a new darcs user.  darcs is very cool.  At least 3 times now
> > > I've been confused because I needed to unpull, but hadn't pulled
> > > anything. Maybe you should change the name.
>
> The name "unpull" was intended to keep people from mistakenly using the
> command who don't fully understand what it does, since it's the most
> dangerous command in darcs.

That, and because its the opposite of pull.  There is no other way to undo 
a pull; so we should really keep unpull whatever the outcome.


> You never actually need to unpull, since unrecord followed by revert is
> identical when there are no local changes.  If there are local changes,
> then record -a, unrecord, revert -a, unrecord would have same effect as
> unpull.  And this is what I'd want a newbie to do--if they work in this
> manner, they are unlikely to accidentally lose their changes.

What about we make this more clear in some way;  I don't really feel its a 
good idea to introduce aliases (opening the floodgates) and while 
obliterate does tell me what it does, the command technically should not 
exist in the fashion that obliterate advertises.
No other srm is as destructive with patches.

I always assumed that in future Darcs would flag import time of a patch 
and use the presence of that flag to disable use of the unpull command, 
pointing to unrecord and revert instead.  This makes complete sense in 
the way darcs works being workflow based and all.

In short; I'd feel we are walking the wrong direction if we should indeed 
make this alias.
-- 
Thomas Zander