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Re: Official revision syntax for Subversion URLs

From: <kfogel_at_collab.net>
Date: 2003-08-05 19:10:14 CEST

John Peacock <jpeacock@rowman.com> writes:
> Point taken. But, how often are users going to be expected to go
> spelunking through old revisions without the crutch of a tool like
> viewcvs or TortoiseSVN?

??? Uh, all the time. What makes you think they wouldn't?

The URL syntax must work as well for the command line client as it
does for GUIs. Many people will happily script the command line
client before picking up a GUI. Nothing wrong with GUIs -- just some
people do things another way.

> Aren't tools with "direct" access to the
> repository able to pull out the root path? If not, then I can see the
> dilemma.

The command line client has the same direct access to the repository
as any other tool, but that isn't the point anyway. The point is to
be able to construct a revision-specific URL *without* contacting the
repository. In other words, you just take a regular URL and apply a
textual transformation to it.

A proposal that doesn't satisfy this criterion is going to get -1'd
very quickly, I'm sure.

> If the syntax is awkward for users without knowledge of the underlying
> repos structure, how much of a handicap is that if the more common
> tools can hide that? Perhaps just having something that makes sense
> to implement (which the tools can easily handle) is more important
> than having it dead simple for endusers to cobble together manually?

We're talking about a URL syntax here. If a human can't construct it,
there's little point in the tool doing it for them :-).

Look at it this way: if we were going to depend on the tool anyway, we
wouldn't need this new URL syntax -- we'd just have a separate text
field for the revision (for GUIs), or a separate option+argument (for
the command line client), as we can already have today.

Getting away from such tool-specific interface dependencies is the
whole purpose of this discussion.

-Karl

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Received on Tue Aug 5 19:49:59 2003

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