Re: Subversion, decentralized version control, and the future.

On Fri, 2007-07-06 at 17:27 -0700, Roy Franz wrote:
> Also, while I am one of the people hoping for improved 'first-class'
> treatment of tags/branches in subversion, I don't see that this

+1, if we are voting!

Like you, I admire the simplicity and elegance of a tag/branch being
just a copy. On the other hand, the fact that these operations are
special only by convention makes administering and controlling them
difficult. For example, in days gone by under CVS we allowed anyone to
place a "private" tag on objects, whereas only repository admins could
create "official" tags (e.g., for a release). Private tags began with
"p_<user_initials>". Official tags were automatically inserted into
Bugzilla as versions of the associated product.

This was extremely easy to setup and enforce with a trigger script under
CVS, since tagging is a sentient operation. With Subversion, as far as I
can tell this requires a pre-commit hook that inspects the target of the
copy and needs to use a set of heuristics to figure out the user's
intent. Moreover, it seems the user could easily subvert the attempted
control by simply choosing a location or name that is not part of the
heuristics.

Just my $0.02 worth ...

Mark

-- 
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Mark S. Reibert, Ph.D.
svn@reibert.com
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