On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, John Peacock wrote:
> I think you are missing my point that subversion is less
> invasive than CVS on this point (since the directory can be
> easily hidden from casual site). And CVS has been in use
> _forever_ and somehow people got used to that CVS/ directory in
> every directory of their sandbox.
> ...
> There are lots of things that you can do in a conventional
> directory tree which will require special handling in a working
> copy. Just storing the admin files outside the tree merely
> hides (and not in a good way) that special handling.
> ...
> Users who refuse to learn new techniques are not the target
> audience here, I think, nor should they be. Version Control
> Systems all require a different work process in order to
> operate.
I also got used to the CVS/ directory, but never liked it. For
me, it's not an issue of doing the proper bookkeeping - it's a
problem with using text tools that don't expect to see anything
other than the project source files. Find, grep, awk, sed, perl,
diff fall into this category.
After using SCM tools that don't have such extra information,
it's very hard to go back to dealing with those meta-data
directories. I want to avoid expending extra effort on a day to
day basis interacting with files that are not actually in the
project.
A number of folks brought up good reasons why they would want the
.svn/ directories in the project tree. This is why my patch is
going to use an optional configuration variable and still be
backward-compatible with the current approach. In other words,
enabling the config option would only apply to new checkouts.
Current project trees will work exactly the same as they do now.
Most arguments for the .svn/ directories center around relocating
or deleting a project tree. My question is this: how often do
you do that as compared to working with a project files
day-to-day?
For myself, the answer to that is "almost never". In other
words, I may relocate or delete an project tree once a month.
However, I use diff, grep, find, perl, awk, sed on projects
almost daily. It's an optimization issue: I would rather spend
the extra few seconds to update the bookkeeping when doing the
infrequent relocate or delete rather than deal with the extra
directories on a daily basis.
In any case, it really boils down to choice: If a developer
wishes to have .svn/ directories in the project tree, so be it.
If they want to have it stored elsewhere, they can turn on the
option. I would defer the debate about which behavior should be
default until after people have had a chance to try it out.
Regards,
Kumaran
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Received on Mon Aug 25 22:39:19 2003