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Re: Official revision syntax for Subversion URLs

From: John Locke <mail_at_freelock.com>
Date: 2003-08-06 00:44:31 CEST

On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 14:30, kfogel@collab.net wrote:
> Okay, I'm beginning to think we don't urgently need to solve this
> problem (a sentiment others have already expressed).
>
Hmm. I respectfully disagree. You're having people external to this
group inventing protocols--Mickael is (hopefully) just the first of many
trying to make an integrated user experience. I think it's important to
nail down your basic URL schema early, before it spins out of your
hands...

> The original motivation for this thread was that Mickael Marchand
> invented a "path?rev" syntax for Subversion URLs, presumably entered
> into text fields in KDE.
>
I'm guessing that what Mickael is implementing can be entered directly
in the address bar of Konqueror--or any Open/Save dialog box in any KDE
application. No extra text fields available.

In KDE 3.1, you can copy files via SSH using the (KDE invented) fish://
protocol. It's very useful, and cool! It's a very simple way to make
secure file transfers to a computer running an SSH daemon--drag and
drop. There's also an IMAP:// protocol to browse an IMAP email server,
another for POP... all in all, I'm finding KDE to be a great way to get
to just about anything in hurry, just by typing a URL. Kudos to Mickael
for some great features!

> We should discourage ad hoc syntax creation, so that users don't get
> misled into thinking there's a cross-environment standard where there
> isn't one. (Hence I've CC'd Mickael on this mail.)
>
Agreed--that's why this should be decided sooner, by this group, rather
than later.

> But it's not necessarily urgent that we choose a standard before SVN
> 1.0 -- sure, it would be nice, but I can see it's going to be a rather
> long discussion, and we don't know how hard it will be to implement on
> the server side even once we know the syntax.
>
Seems to me the important thing is to define the syntax now, so that
anybody wanting to implement it doesn't go off and create their own
solutions while waiting for this. For example, early in this thread, it
was mentioned that the KDE protocol would be svn://. You've already
created a scheme for allowing different transports to the svnserver--
svn+ssh:// being the prime example. Seems that this could easily be
extended to be svn+http://, svn+https://, and svn+file:// to provide a
complete protocol scheme that can be typed from an address bar--and
furthermore, these are the schemes we should encourage KDE (and others)
to use, instead of redefining svn://.

Karl, you said earlier in this thread you wanted to call a vote soon. In
the end, it doesn't matter that much exactly which syntax Subversion
uses, but it seems critical (to me) that a syntax is defined as early as
possible. Seems worth holding a vote and being done with the issue--if
not, it'll just keep coming back...

--John

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Received on Wed Aug 6 00:45:26 2003

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