Karl Fogel <kfogel@galois.ch.collab.net> writes:
> Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU> writes:
> > So, in Jim's conception of the world, a branch is exactly like a copy,
> > and is visible in the filesystem like a copy would be.
> >
> > That world view suggests that the wc has to make a copy of the whole
> > directory. (With some conceivably funky admin files.) Which is
> > decidedly not a fast operation--slower than a CVS tag operation, even.
> >
> > So I remain confused as to whether (a) I don't know something about
> > the wc view of branches, and how it meshes with the filesystem view of
> > branches, or (b) nobody has really thought about this yet.
>
> It doesn't need to be so complex. Can't you just switch the subtree
> of the wc over to the newly-created branch, by tweaking a few metadata
> files?
This sort of breaks the idea that your wc somehow matches a portion of
the repos fs. I mean, suppose I've got a wc of the `baz' project,
which contains sub-projects. If I want to create a cheap-copy branch
of the sub-project `foo':
$ ls
SVN/ glob.c foo/ bar/
$ svn copy foo/ foobranch/
$ ls
SVN/ glob.c foo/ foobranch/ bar/
$ svn branch foobranch
So what happens now? Does foo magically disappear and foobranch get
locally renamed to foo? Or some other oddness?
I just don't think that the "move my wc to a branch" paradigm can be
mixed with the "dirs are branches" paradigm. The user interface
implications are too different.
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:23 2006