Re: Additional Bootstrap Method

On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 11:13:38AM -0500, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Chris Parker <subversion@playswithfire.com> writes:
> > It might be worth noting that for real work, you can also bootstrap a
> > version (albeit unversioned) of subversion by mounting the repos over
> > webdavfs or the like, and just copy TOT svn right to your local
> > drive. I wound up doing this when I didn't have a copy of the svn
> > binary handy. I suppose it sounds obvious, but this lowers the
> > barrier to "I wanna play with subversion" a little bit.
> >
> > When you want the versioned flavor, just check it out afterward.
>
> Holy cow, that was slick :-).

It works, but you could also end up with a corrupt copy. The problem is that
during the copy, you're getting whatever the HEAD is for that specific
request. During the time that you're fetching the tree, five commits could
come in, each drastically changing something about the tree. You'll end up
with bits from rev N through N+4.

That said, if you like to play the odds, then this pattern works
wonderfully. Or if you know the repository is idle. etc.

IOW, excellent trick, but there are some serious caveats to be wary of.

IOW^2, let's not use this recommendation on our website, but leave it to the
power hackers :-) [okay, well maybe a footnote in a faq or something, "I
copied from the WebDAV mount and ended up with non-buildable crap! what
happened?" and let the big brains reverse that into an understanding]

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
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