I would like to request, at the very least, something like "File x already exists, overwrite?". Ideally, this would then ask to diff the two.

anonymous claiming to be mario added on 2010-06-22 16:41:32:
Yeah, I've run into this too. Lost a bit of new code when trying to bring an existing code base into Fossil version control.

The term "open" does not convey that anything is going to be overwritten. That's an uncommon event with that terminology. Here is a clear need for a big fat warning in the documentation or a behaviour fix. Instead of the optional --keep, there should be a required --overwrite if anyone really wants to kill current data in favour of repository contents.

eric added on 2010-06-22 18:25:02:
If you had done

fossil help open

(and why wouldn't you if you are new to Fossil), you would have found out about --keep. But I would never have considered anything other than creating a new working directory first (including the fossil open) and copying my stuff into it after that. Do not expect software to work the way you expect it to work, always check!

If confirmation requests were added it would interfere with my work methods.