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Re: .svn directories

From: Kumaran Santhanam <kumaran_at_tigris.org>
Date: 2003-08-25 18:54:24 CEST

On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Greg Hudson wrote:
> Let's keep the arguments straight here:
>
> Argument 1 (yours): recursive commands bump into .svn
> directories, which is sometimes undesirable.
>
> Argument 2 (Jesper's): naive users copy parts of working
> directories and don't understand they're copying metadata as
> well.
>
> This particular thread is talking about argument 2. The users of
> argument 2 are naive. They don't know they should use a special command
> to copy stuff from working directories. They probably aren't
> comfortable typing commands at all. They aren't thoughtful enough to
> know that they need to somehow inform the computer how the target of the
> copy will be used.

Thank you for making this more explicit. They are indeed two
arguments, but I believe they have a common solution. Let me
explain:

In my case, recursive commands are bothered by the .svn/
directories. This is easily solved by relocating the .svn/
directories to a tree outside of the workspace. There have been
solutions proposed in which the workspace is mirrored, but these
seem to be sub-optimal compared to simply fixing the client.

Jesper's users don't inform the source control system after
they've copied the directories. Granted, my solution won't
completely solve this for them. However, I'm drawing on the
experience that this hasn't been a problem in commercial SCM
tools that do not have meta-data directories, since all of those
require the same sort of notification.

The crux in Jesper's case is failure-mode. If the user
accidentally copies the .svn/ directories, I would suspect that
SVN's behavior is more unpredictable. On the other hand, if
there are no .svn/ directories and the working files are copied
without informing SVN, the new files will show up as '?' when
doing 'svn status' (or the equivalent in a GUI). It seems to me
that the latter is a softer landing, so to speak.

I suspect that Jesper's users wish to copy a small directory to
another location and submit them to source control. Please
clarify if I'm wrong about this. In this case, the softer
landing is much more desirable, since it's essentially what they
were trying to do in the first place.

On a slightly different note: Besides the v1.0 release
arguments, I'm curious to know if anybody out there actually
prefers having built-in .svn/ directories, and if so, in which
scenario they might need them.

Kumaran

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Received on Mon Aug 25 18:55:34 2003

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