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RE: Re: svn modules (was Re: Features and release dates)

From: Bill Tutt <rassilon_at_lyra.org>
Date: 2002-05-02 17:13:23 CEST

I'm not particularlily happy about VSS's sharing concept. The concept
tends to break down when you want to create a branch in VSS. VSS's
sharing concept maps to a hard link concept in SVN's filesystem. Due to
SVN's filesystem schema, and it's O(1) copy behavior creating a branch
that contains a hardlink will not always produce a result that makes
sense. Especially if the hard link isn't tied to just one point in time.
(The new NodeID PK mechinism, and how it interacts with NodeID concepts
makes hard links spanning repository revisiions more difficult.)

So, if you want links, I'd highly recommend doing the symbolic link
approach first. They fit much more nicely into SVN's data model, don't
have issues when people create a branch (since they can be
path-relative), and are certainly much easier to implement.

Bill

> From: Greg Stein [mailto:gstein@lyra.org]
>
> On Wed, May 01, 2002 at 04:40:16PM -0500, Eric Gillespie wrote:
> >...
> > I don't like the text-file based modules. CVS does that and it
> > drives me nuts. Subversion doesn't really need to duplicate this
> > feature. All that is necessary is a kind of symlink in the repo.
>
> Unfortunately, symlinks in the repo aren't enough. I believe that
> Subversion
> will be more multiple-repository-prone than CVS. As an example:
>
> The ASF has one CVS repository, which contains modules for each
project:
> httpd-2.0, apr, and apr-util to name a few. However, in SVN land, I
> believe
> we're have a separate SVN repository for each project. I think the
> projects
> will want their own directory organization (trunk, branches, tags,
> whatever)
> and their own (partitioned) set of log messages / revision changes.
>
> As a result, cross-repository "modules" are quite important for SVN.
It
> also
> means that when the ASF switches over to SVN, we can set up a "module"
for
> Subversion that references the ASF SVN repositories.
>
> The strategy for modules, as outlined in the issue, easily supports
> cross-repository modules.
>
> >...
> > This is more general-purpose and much more flexible than modules.
> > What does everyone think?
>
> Hard and soft links in the repository will be extremely handy. As long
as
> your patches for implementing them come in digestible chunks, then I
don't
> see any obvious reason that we would /not/ include them before 1.0.
Even
> if
> you don't get them all done by 1.0, we could still include partial,
> incremental support for links.
>
> Cheers,
> -g
>
> --
> Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
>
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Received on Thu May 2 18:17:03 2002

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