remove vs rm vs forget (was [MERGE] remove --new)

[Michael Ellerman]

On 6/5/06, Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> wrote:
> On 29 May 2006, Aaron Bentley <aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> > This patch adds support for "bzr remove --new", as discussed earlier on
> > the list.  As is frequently the case, the tests are longer than the
> > tested code.
>
> This looks reasonable, but it reminds me of something else:
>
> At the moment, 'bzr rm foo' makes foo unversioned, but doesn't remove it
> from the working directory.  This is a bit weird.
>
> So I propose to do this:
>
>   bzr rm foo      -- delete it from the working directory and inventory
>   bzr remove foo  -- just remove from the inventory, leave the file

-1 from me, this is bound to result in people a) being confused and b)
losing data.

I'd suggest:
 - "bzr rm" is deprecated.
 - "bzr remove" is an alias for  "bzr unversion" and does the opposite
of "bzr add".
 - when users want to remove a file they just "rm" it.
 - when this happens the file becomes "missing" in bzr terms
 - you can't commit with "missing" files, you have to either recreate
the file, or "bzr unversion" it.
 - there should be an easy way to say "unversion all the currently
missing files".

This has the, IMHO desirable, properties that:
 - bzr never deletes user data.
 - users can use standard tools to remove files, eg. "rm" or via Nautilus.
 - but, because removal is a potentially dangerous operation, there's
still a confirmation step required.
 - it's harder to accidentally unversion a file.

cheers