Be defensive... Re: A tale of user-friendliness with "hg merge" and "hg rollback".

[Masklinn]

On 12 Oct 2009, at 23:52 , Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
>
>
> Given that you seem to have been the victim of some kind of phantom  
> error,
> I'm not sure what reading would help.

Not a phantom bug so much as an unexpected behavior (Rob clearly  
didn't expect that hg rollback after a clone would rollback the pull  
part of the clone, instead he expected it would rollback the pull of  
the latest changeset he merged).

This could probably be fixed by making hg rollback explain what it  
does a bit more (if that's possible at all, I have no idea how  
rollback works) as currently, it isn't necessarily clear what it's  
just done and the user's mental model (of how rollback works, or of  
what consistutes "a transaction") might be wrong.

In Rob's case, had rollback said `rolling back pull from http://landley.net/code 
/firmware` instead of just `rolling back last transaction`, he'd  
probably have understood why all the content of his repo had just  
disappeared.