Re: Easy comparisons between related trunks, branches, and tags

On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 06:36:23PM +0200, Alan Barrett wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Nov 2005, Christian Stork wrote:
...
> > The projectrule property could contain a mapping from nicknames to
> > subdirs, eg:

> > crazy branches/users/jim/experimental/crazy
> > beta branches/beta
> > a branches/alpha

> If you add a wildcard syntax, so that we could say

> rel-* tags/releases/rel-$1

> with the right hand side "$1" referring to whatever was matched by
> the left hand side "*", then I think you have all the capabilities of
> the rewrite rules proposal. If the nickname rules are optional, and
> everything works (just without nicknames) in the presence of only the
> projectroot and treeroot properties, then you also have something that's
> easier to set up (in common simple cases) than rewrite rules. I think
> we have a winner.

Indeed, looks nice. :-) The only caveat introduced by wildcards that I
can think of are accidental nickname clashes. For example:

* branches/users/jim/experimental/*
* branches/users/chris/well-thought-out/*

seems like a really bad idea. It is the users responsibility to prevent
name clashes:

jim-* branches/users/jim/experimental/*
chris-* branches/users/chris/well-thought-out/*

Of course, guaranteed overlap-free matching could be automatically
verified, but now we are getting into the land of over-engineering.
Hmm, maybe a workable solution would be if subversion complains or
errors out if it detects an ambiguity when used. So, as long as the
expansion for the stars in the first example don't collide everythning
is fine.

Also note, that if we deem wildcard patterns worthy for nickname
determination, than we have a good reason to choose this proposal over
the conceptually simpler (but maybe practically more annoying) "svn ls"
idea.

-- 
Chris Stork   <>  Support eff.org!  <>   http://www.ics.uci.edu/~cstork/
OpenPGP fingerprint:  B08B 602C C806 C492 D069  021E 41F3 8C8D 50F9 CA2F
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