Re: Feature request: keywords ideas.

On Thursday 05 September 2002 09:38, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Well, they can be used for associating metadata with a file, metadata
> that you don't want to appear in the text of the file itself. But
> that's not the case with the keywords you described, because their
> whole purpose is to appear in the text of the file :-).

Then why have keywords at all? The revision, date, author, and url are all
metadata about a file, which anyone can find out with any number of other svn
commands (st, log, ls, etc.).

I think the issue, and the reason why including not only the preset keywords
but any arbitrary metadata in a file is good, is that once a file is exported
from its working-copy environment (svn export, or just as a result of a build
process), all the svn metadata that isn't included in the text of a file is
lost. If I want to get metadata other than the five preset keywords, I'm SOL
once the source is exported.

So, why have keywords if they can't be redefined? I guess the only difference
between the predefined keywords and arbitrary ones is that they are
automatically updated for each commit, whereas arbitrary ones would require a
separate propset command. As Leandro said, "svn ps Maintainer 'John Doe'
file1 file2 file3..." still has advantages over editing each file by hand. I
suppose one could write a perl script to do that, but I hope you see the
point :)

-- 
Peter Davis
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