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Re: are directories versioned?

From: <kfogel_at_collab.net>
Date: 2005-01-05 17:52:35 CET

erh@swapsimple.com writes:
> I mean revert changes related to the additional and removal of
> files, i.e. undo changes to the contents of the directory. There
> have been several times where I've wanted to undo moving a file,
> but still keep the changes to contents of the file. There have also
> been some fewer times when I've wanted to undo the changes to the
> contents of the file, but leave it in it's newly moved to location.

Ah, I see.

No, Subversion doesn't have an interface that supports that, although
it could -- the underlying data structures would allow it with no
problem.

> I think of a directory as a file that is a list of other files
> and meta information about those files, whose contents can be "edited"
> (with appropriate commands) and versioned just like any other file. When
> treated this way, directories are special only when they are used to
> build the human understandable view of the contents of the repository.
> It's sounding a lot like directories in subversion are more of an
> emergent phenomenom that arises because files have pathnames associated
> them, and the fact that directories look different in different revisions
> is because the files have a different pathname property. Is this anything
> like what subversion actually does?
> This isn't what I would consider the most obvious way to arrange
> things, but it does seem to have some benefits: to compare to how clearcase
> does things, when you revert a directory _all_ file adds/dels/etc.. are
> undone and you can't directly revert just a single one, whereas with
> subversion you can.
> (although that seems to be incomplete wrt undoing a move)

Er, nope. I often play the "guess the implementation from the
features" game too, and I also get it wrong sometimes :-). Subversion
implements directories as first-class objects. The reason the feature
you want isn't available is just because the UI, and to some degree
the first-level APIs, offer no access to it. But under the hood,
Subversion could easily do it.

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Received on Wed Jan 5 18:00:28 2005

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