[darcs-users] Re: argh. please change the name "unpull"

Mark Stosberg mark at summersault.com
Thu Mar 17 20:58:17 UTC 2005


On 2005-03-17, Zooko O'Whielacronx <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:
>
> I just spent 5 minutes talking past my boss about unpulling a patch.  
> He wanted to know, if I was unpulling the patch from the server, where 
> was I unpulling it from?  I kept trying to explain that I was going to 
> ssh into the server to do this operation.  Finally I realized why he 
> was confused.  I said "The thing is, this operation shouldn't be named 
> 'unpull'.  It should be named 'erase'.".  There was a couple of seconds 
> of silence.  "Oh.", he said.
>
> So please change the name and let all future programmers save 5 minutes 
> of their time explaining to their co-workers that "unpull" doesn't 
> involve two different repos the way "pull" does.

I agree that 'unpull' is confusing because it sounds like it involves
two servers. This notion can give the false idea that since you are
'unpulling' a patch, it must continue to exist in another location 
that it was 'pulled' from. (And therefore has a degree of safety).

In fact, you can delete a patch with unpull that never left your repo.

'erase' is OK, but could be confused that it erases files rather than
patches. That's probably fairly unlikely, since 'rm', 'remove' and
'delete' and more commonly associated with files.

    Mark





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