Re: SVN droppings -- or: To turd or not to turd

> So, why can't it be done this way:

I think this is probably the right way of handling directories which
are themselves data objects. It can be a property of the directory in
the repository whether or not the directory is an object or not.

The metadata layout in the working directory can probably be
simplified relative to what you envision. You just need to allow
metadata under the SVN directory to refer to files in subdirectories;
no extra information should be required. If "foo" is a
directory-object, then you simply can't execute SVN commands from
within foo, and you shouldn't want to. (Neither can you copy "foo" to
a different location; that would be like copying a single file to a
different location and expecting to be able to operate on it.)

I think treating directories as wholesale data objects is contrary to
Unix philosophy. (As an example of the philosophical difference, you
can atomically replace a file, but not a directory.) So if Unix is
our primary platform, we may not want to worry about this for 1.0.

> And as SVN has no "backward compatibility" load to carry, NOW is the
> time to act.

This isn't a big deal. If people have to upgrade their clients before
they can use directory-objects, that's not a big hassle.
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:07 2006