design note: allow recovery rather than prevent-mistakes

[Jonathan Lange]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 6:48 PM, Robert
Collins<robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
> An early choice made in a lot of bzr was to allow people to recover
> rather than strictly prevent mistakes. Not all of bzr does this, and I
> don't think all of it should: not all things are easy to recover from,
> or able to be [cheaply] made easy to recover from.
>
> I think its worth remembering though: when proposing UI changes, try to
> bear this in mind: its might nicer as a user to be told that something
> is unusual and how to undo your action, than to be told that you cannot
> do the action at all. Where some users want to absolutely prevent the
> action, having an optional --strict, like we do in commit, can be a nice
> compromise to achieve that.
>

I agree with this design principle, and wish Launchpad embraced it
more strongly.

Is there somewhere we can record this principle so it can be referred
to in future discussions? The HACKING guide perhaps?

jml