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Re: CVS & Subversion evaluation

From: Jesse Tilly <jtilly_at_duffbrew.com>
Date: 2004-02-20 05:14:40 CET

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My bad...just joined the list to reply to an earlier thread.

I'm about to migrate my company to Subversion from VSS and CVS (most
VSS). One recent bit of irritation has cropped up, however, and I want
to make sure it's my fault, not a glaringly missing feature in SVN.

With CVS, you can non-recursively checkout a module, then when you
update, you can tell CVS to "create missing directories". You'd use this
mainly if you started off working on one part of a large project, and
then moved on to working on another part. For example:

I have a project in module projectA. I only need to change config files,
so I checkout projectA/config. For one month, I work on
projectA/config/. Now, I need to change some source related to the
config. In CVS, I would non-recursively update projectA, telling CVS to
"create missing directories". I get projectA/tools and projectA/src. I
go into src (where I suspect the config code is). Update again
(non-recursive, create dirs) and projectA/src/config shows up. I go into
that dir and update it all proper-like.

Again, I'm doing it this way becuase don't want everything in the
repository (for whatever reason...it doesn't matter here).

A key note that at no time did I need to know any dir name aside from
the root module. I'm letting CVS create the directories for me as needed.

If I'm using SVN, I can't work this way. I *have* to have checked-out
the whole project, including everything I didn't want/need. Yes, i'm
aware I can checkout dirs piecemeal, but then I have to either know the
full URL with help from using 'svn ls' or the repos browsers in the SVN
guis. This is not intuitive nor very convienient.

I think the problem is that SVN checks my empty dir and thinks it
doesn't need to update cause I'm at the latest revision. For example,
say I checkout projectA non-recursively. There's no files in projectA,
so I have an empty directory. But, because 'svn update' won't create
missing directories I can never fix my situation. I can either checkout
projectA recursively (downloading tons of code I don't want) or I can do
it piecemeal which is a pain in the butt...and something I won't want to
support with 200 developers asking me "why does it do this?"

I'd love to help fix this *if it's really a problem*. I'm asking the
current SVN maintainers if this use case is "works as designed" or if
I'm really describing a feature that need implementation.

Hope that was enough information (probably too much).

here's to wishing the problem's between the laptop and the chair...

- -jesse

Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:

| On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 20:43, Jesse Tilly wrote:
|
|
|>CVS will create missing directories. This does not seem to be the
|>natural behavior for SVN. It seems I have to checkout the directory. Why
|>is this a problem? It means I need to know the full URL and *also* have
|>SVN download everything below the missing directory. But, as Early said,
|>SVN doesn't even work that way. You have to get the "error" and then
|>perform an update. That doesn't seem right tome.
|>
|>Is there a thread or issue I'm missing that explains why this is the
|>natural behavior for SVN or is this clearly a place where some
|>contribution is in order?
|
|
| I'm sorry, I think I've lost the context for your mail. You didn't
| connect it to the original thread (which I can't seem to find in the
| mailing list archive), have changed the subject, and didn't quote the
| original mail. So I'm not sure what you're "following up" to.
|
| Can you be more explicit?
|
|
|
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Received on Fri Feb 20 05:15:01 2004

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