When manually resolving directory conflicts isn't a feature

[Aaron Bentley]

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Martin Pool wrote:
> 2009/4/8 Aaron Bentley <aaron at aaronbentley.com>:
> 
>> There is a genuine conflict.

>> We can also pursue classifying files as "junk", which would be a more
>> general solution, but would make the user model more complex.

> From memory, you can even get a conflict when merging the rename of a
> directory that contains ignored files.  That seems like a simpler case
> where we should just do the rename and move the ignored files with it.

I don't think that case causes a conflict.  It would really surprise me.

> I think the overwhelmingly common case is that ignored files are junk
> and should be deleted when the directory is deleted.  Against this,
> deleting a file when it was wanted is worse than making the user
> explicitly delete it -- but not infinitely worse, and I feel like
> we're generating many conflicts for every case where it saves you.
> 
> Maybe we should say ignored files are safe to delete and then create a
> new category 'precious' for things that are not to be added but also
> not to be deleted.  (iirc that's what the term meant in tla but it was
> not fully implemented.)

Implementing 'precious' vs implementing 'junk' is a bit of a
tomayto/tomawto situation, but I lean towards implementing 'junk',
because ignored files are de-facto precious now, and this would minimize
behavioural change.  We could make junk supersede ignored, so that users
could put files on both lists for backwards compatibility.

Aaron
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