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Re: repository URLs (was: Just say no to collections: moving wc meta-data out of the wc)

From: Greg Hudson <ghudson_at_MIT.EDU>
Date: 2002-05-30 02:34:43 CEST

On Wed, 2002-05-29 at 19:54, Greg Stein wrote:
> 1) The identifier is private (an opaque string).
> 2) The identifier is public (meaning it has specific semantics associated
> with it, and can probably be presented to the user).

Either would work, I think, but I prefer (2). Things may not generally
need the URL of the root of the repository, but it doesn't really hurt
to give it to them. And (1) is conceptually more complicated, because
the client and the server think of the identifier differently, whereas
in (2) they think of it the same way. (That kind of complexity is a
good thing when there is a reason to hide information, but I don't see
any reason here.)

I imagine some GUI presentation tools would appreciate having the
repository URL handy. For instance, you might want to show how a
working directory relates to the root of the repository it lives in.

Philosophically speaking, I'm betting that you prefer (1) because you
instinctively think of a repository as a collection of versioned
resources, because that's how DeltaV works. You don't much like the
idea of being able to poke at where the repository starts because you
want everyone to think about the individual resource and not the
container it lives in. But that's not really the Subversion model; in
Subversion, the container *is* the versioned resource, and the
individual file or directory is just a piece of it. It makes perfect
sense to want to know where the versioned resource starts in that model,
even if the core Subversion operations don't generally need to.

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Received on Sat Jun 1 14:22:35 2002

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