Re: browsing the reprository

On Mon, Dec 03, 2001 at 06:55:26PM -0500, Brandon Ehle wrote:
>...
> > You can perform a checkout from anywhere within the tree you are
> > browsing, even on a particular revision if you like.
> >
> > Because of the lack of an 'ls' in cvs, its clients never implemented
> > this.

I fully expect a "proper" client to walk over a server using WebDAV
requests. At any point, the user could just go ahead and checkout from the
current point.

A GUI client could do this today, with no changes on our part.

>...
> > I'm not that particular about whether the command line client exposes
> > 'ls' functionality (although I don't see why not), but I think it
> > would be highly desirable to include this within the client library.

Possibly. The real question becomes, "if we implement a function to do this,
will it handle all the needs?" I think that we'd end up just adding more and
more and more to the function (or growing it to a set of functions!) to deal
with increasingly sophisticated clients.

For example, what about the last revision a file was modified in? What about
the binary, mime-type, and executable properties for a file? Modification
time? By whom?

All of these are easily expressible if the client just used WebDAV and
fetched the interesting properties. We'd have a lot of covers to write if we
wanted to supply these to a client. And note it is only for browsing a
repository, not actual operation of the server.

And yes: I realize that pointing to DAV as the answer disregards ra_local.
But ra_local is the black sheep. Our intent is that ra_dav is the primary
mechanism (read: best supported) for talking to the server.

> > If you don't, then we end up with the same scenario of switching
> > between multiple tools just to perform a checkout.
>
> Yeah, I agree that this is a really bad limitation to CVS that even
> WebDAV doesn't entirely fix, that will *hopefully* get addressed.

Huh? WebDAV *does* entirely fix it. Please explain if you believe otherwise.

PROPFIND is used to navigate a repository. We do it today, and we always
would in the future. The advanced browsing that I mention above is solely
based on WebDAV's PROPFIND method.

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
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