On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 07:03:06PM +0200, Branko ??ibej wrote:
> Nope, that's "svn switch"; quite similar, but entirely different. :-)
> Which is not to say you couldn't have the same UI for both update and
> switch, of course.
So you "svn update" to go back/forth along a branch and "svn switch"
to jump from one branch to another? Seems that I am beginning to
understand :) Looks good. It was always hard to explain new co-workers
the overload of the "cvs update" and its -A switch =8). What happens
when you give "svn update" a wrong URL (one directory too deep or some
such?)
I have read the handbook several times, but somehow managed to
misunderstand this very basic distinction. It seems to me that the
confusion came from the redundancy contained in the parameters of
"svn switch". Given the example in section 2.4.2 of the handbook,
something like "svn switch mooIRC-beta subsystem/renderer"
would make more sense to me. "http://foo.com/repos/mooIRC" can be
determined from mooIRC/subsystem/renderer/.svn/entries and
"subsystem/renderer" is already given on the command line.
> > | REVISION: |
> > |-------------|
> > | Latest | << corresponds to "HEAD"
> > | Branch... | << pops up a dialog where you enter a number
> >
>
> You mean "URL" here, don't you? Branches aren't numbered in Subversion
> (at least, not so it's visible to the user).
Hmmm, I find it very confusing to speak about URLs when you really
mean branches. Maybe I am too biased to cvs philosophy, but I think
most SCM systems have a concept which is similar to cvs-branches.
> Tags, branches, and directories are all the same thing in Subversion.
> What you're saying would make sense in CVS, but not in SVN. The two
> concepts are: "update", with an optional revision number or date; and
> "switch", with a tag or branch name, and -- again -- an optional
> revision or date.
But isn't "update" just a special case of "switch"? Can't you always
substitute an "update" through a "switch"? And then: should the user
really care which command is used internally? I think that on the
User-Interface it would make very much sense to speak about
"branches", "tags" and "revisions" and hide the "URLs" and
"directories" that are used internally. This is just because most
people are already used to "branches" and "tags".
Any opinions to such a proposal?
I am not really sure whether I am too biased to CVS. I have made the
expirience that it is very easy to explain new co-workers about
branches and tags. I found it only hard to explain the sticky tags and
the -A option that cvs use to implement moving withhin/across
branches. So I think it would be good to inherit the branch notation.
--
-- Josef Wolf -- jw@raven.inka.de --
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Received on Wed Jul 31 22:01:50 2002