clobber or overwrite or ???

[Harald Meland]

[Steve Borho]

> On Saturday 22 October 2005 07:17 pm, Robert Collins wrote:
>> Both push and pull have the concept of being able to be told: "Really do
>> your thing." when the revision-history of the modified branch is not a
>> prefix of the source branch.
>>
>> Aaron used --overwrite, I used --clobber. After a quick discussion on
>> #bzr, everyone seemed to think clobber was local to their region :).
>>
>> What does the list think? clobber is more fun, and I *think* everyone
>> will know what it means, particularly with a help message.
>
> 'noclobber' is a common shell option (bourne, csh, zsh, etc) which
> prevents existing files from being overwritten by a shell pipe.

All of these shells are pretty unix centric.  Would e.g. a Windows
user know that connotation for "clobber"?

Besides, even among unix users, I suspect there's a lot of users who
are unaware of this shell option.

I've tried looking in a quite few dictionaries, and only found
CS-specific ones that lists the "overwrite" meaning of "clobber".  In
these, "clobber" is said to mean "overwrite, usually inintentionally"
-- but the proposed bzr functionality seems to be for very
*intentional* overwriting.

Non-CS-specific dictionaries do list a few other meanings, though.  I
think one of those is of particular concern:

 * personal possessions -- an informal term.  So, wouldn't it be
   reasonable to understand "pull --clobber" as "Pull upstreams
   changes while retaining my 'personal possessions' in the same
   branch" -- which is exactly the opposite of "overwrite"?

> So I think using 'clobber' as an argument would be perfectly acceptable.

I think "overwrite" is much clearer.
-- 
Harald