remove vs rm vs forget

[Matthew Hannigan]

On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 07:45:42PM +0300, Jari Aalto+mail.perl wrote:
> I would put more weight on the existing convention that people are
> already user to.
> 
> The command
> 
>     rm
> 
> Has established history since day one. The meanin is clear even in context
> of VCS:
>     
>     "remove file from repository (or whatever it's properly called)"
> 
> The SVN follows this convention with good success.

?  SVN deletes the file as well as removing from repository.
Or do you mean working directory (if so you're confusing the
heck out of me.)

> People are familiar
> with it. An extra option to physically delete the file from local disk
> is in in par with the idea of:
> 
>     "Do something more"
> 
> And the command
>     
>     bzr rm [--delete]
> 
> is simply
> 
> - Elegant
> - Self explanatory

Hardly.  rm is the Unix delete command.  People would be
confused if it did not delete the file without an option.

I, very much to my regret, argued that the arch remove
command also delete the file.  I now think pretty strongly
that it should not touch the file at all by default, but
merely unversion it.


> - Need not much explanation to existing users (supposing Unix here)
> 
> The "remove" and "rm" can be synonyms of course, so that they 
> serve both command line users and backend delevelopers.

rm in particular, but also remove are hopelessly
overloaded with meanings.

I've come to like unversion/unadd.  They're pretty
clunky but far more accurate.

Matt