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Re: Why not hide .SVN dir on windows?

From: David Waite <mass_at_akuma.org>
Date: 2003-05-22 22:07:28 CEST

Jeff Cave wrote:

>I woud say default yes. Mostly for consistency between OSes. Under the Unix variants, these folders are hidden, they should be hidden under windows as well. If you need arguments for hiding the folder just look back at what the arguements for hiding them under unix was. (I have no idea what these are, but there must have been some reason for doing this).
>
>
The issue is that hiding on unix is a very established practice, while
on windows - not so much.

The benefits you would hope to get from such hiding (such as excluding
from file search tools) don't really happen; unlike the read-only bit,
the hidden bit is pretty much only honored by the 'dir' command and the
explorer shell.

The side effects are that unless you have something installed like
TortoiseSVN installed or have modified your windows settings, there is
no indication available that the directory has or does not have revision
control information. "Optical Spam" at least lets the user keep knowing
what is going on.

The hidden bit is not set because every blessing you get from setting it
on windows is a mixed blessing at best. If there was a clear cut
advantage to setting the bit that didnt' require people to install more
software or tweak global explorer settings, I'm sure people would be
more receptive.

Perhaps the 'best' alternative would be to request a clear-cut way to do
this yourself - is there some sort of client notification in the
libraries that can be used to change the attributes on a new .svn dir or
any new files created within it? You said it best - this would be at
most an optional feature on one platform - we should make sure that
clients can support it if they desire, rather than requiring support in
the core svn libraries.

-David Waite

>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: dimentiy@dimentiy.info [mailto:dimentiy@dimentiy.info]
>>Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 1:11 PM
>>To: dev@subversion.tigris.org
>>Subject: RE: Why not hide .SVN dir on windows?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>Will hiding the .svn directories cause problems for users? If
>>>>not, why not?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Why yes?
>>>You always can see this directories, _if_you_want_. It's a
>>>main reason.
>>>Generally, ".svn" directories used by svn.exe, not by user.
>>>And for end-user this information - optical spam, I mean.
>>>
>>>
>>p.s. I mean, best solution - make hiding .svn dirs an option
>>(okay, let's with default "no" value).
>>
>>--
>>Dimentiy.
>>
>>
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>>

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Received on Thu May 22 22:09:11 2003

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