

Re: [PATCH] Implement svnadmin verify --force

From: Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de>
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 12:45:49 +0200

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 11:57:12AM +0200, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
> Using terminology from <http://s.apache.org/xy-problem>: if X is "I am
> not comfortable writings loops in DOS batch", I don't think applying
> your patch to trunk is the correct Y.

I still don't get why you're so much objected to this.

I'd like to have this feature because it will make my work a little
easier should I ever be tasked again with repairing broken repositories.
When I last had to repair a couple of dozen revisions in a broken
repository I was rather annoyed at the way 'svnadmin verify' currently
works. The current behaviour of 'svnadmin verify' is not very useful for
answering the question "which revisions are broken?". It only answers
the question "which is the first broken revision?", which so far has
never been sufficient information when I had to verify a repository.

Usually I need to quickly assess the overall impact of repository damage,
and also quickly assess the overall impact of fixes I make to repair the
repository. The number of the first broken revision isn't enough information.

We usually don't require people to write loops anywhere else to obtain
useful behaviour from our command line tools.
For example, 'svn diff' accepts multiple targets. By your logic it is
just as easy to call it in a loop to diff all targets in turn, isn't it?
But that would be just as annoying.

A proper 'svnadmin verify' loop will also collect errors reported and
show a summary at the end. That's additional overhead if coding this as
a loop on the command line. The repos library can easily collect this
information internally and pass it as the final notification.
I won't require Prabhu's patch to print a summary but the functionality
Prabhu is adding is a required step anyway if we want to print a summary.
I'll happily add the summary part myself if nobody else does it.

And I don't think that even a published wrapper script in our tools/
directory would be as useful as having this feature built-in.
If you're on some customer's server you're usually constrained and cannot
install some random script interpreter. Not every Subversion server in
the world has python or similar programs installed. But they all have
the 'svnadmin' program.
Received on 2012-10-26 12:46:38 CEST
