Re: Emacs VC Subversion back end: release early, release often

Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com> writes:

> This implements all the "required" VC backend functions, and can do
> updates, commits, logs and diffs. It's almost certainly riddled with
> bugs, and I'd love to hear about each of them.

> One big problem here is that VC only lets you commit a file at a time.
> For CVS, that's not such a big deal, as long as it's easy to re-use
> old commit messages (which it is). For Subversion, it's a very big
> deal: you can only make transactions that affect a single file at a
> time, which sort of misses the whole point. It basically means VC is
> useless for anything but diff, log, and a meaningful mode line. Of
> course, you can still do commits at the command line; that's what I do
> with CVS.

> I think VC's maintainer would be happy to see this restriction lifted.
> But I want to first produce code that Subversion users can use with an
> already released Emacs distribution. So for now I'm working within
> the limitations of the released VC; once we've got something
> functional, then we can start writing VC patches.

Before going too far down the path of modifying VC, which has an interface
very much oriented towards a single file at a time (intentionally so), you
may want to look at the pcl-cvs package which already supports multi-file
commits, renames, and other things that Subversion can actually version.
It may be an easier starting point.

I imagine there are a lot of people like me, who use VC to commit changes
to single files and use pcl-cvs to do anything more complicated. They
work fairly well in a complimentary setup.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra_at_stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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