Re: Proposal for $Revision$ keyword amendment

Molle Bestefich wrote:
> Expanding keywords in non-changed files, OTOH, at first seems like a
> bad idea, as there is no feedback to the user telling h(im/er) that
> any changes was done related to that file.

> Thinking a bit more about it, though, the idea becomes a lot more
> appealing. Feedback should just be added, but it would be a rather
> large alteration of the meaning of 'svn commit' output to call it 'M'
> for file modifications. A new flag 'K' could be added to the output,
> meaning "you asked to commit this file; it had no changes but we
> expanded it's working copy related keywords".

I'm not sure how many other ways I can say this: Subversion has no way to
permit updating keywords in otherwise unchanged files. That is "action at a
distance" and is much worse than suggesting developers use their build system
appropriately.

The concept you are trying to shoehorn into Subversion, 'last commit for this
WC', is _project_ meta-data in that it doesn't apply to any specific file but
rather to all files. As such, it is best handled outside of Subversion's
keywords handling itself, which is completely _file_ oriented. Any given build
system only needs a single methodology to handle expanding this value in
whatever file needs to be expanded (an include file can be used in whatever
files need the value in question so that there is only a single change required).

>>keyword, the inevitable next question is "Why can't I get that file
>>updated automatically in all files that have it?"
>
>
> The answer to that question is hopefully the same in both cases.
> "Files that you target with a 'svn' operation will be modified, others
> we leave alone."

        $ svn ci -m 'This commit recursively targets all files below here'

It's just not an acceptable performance penalty to potentially change every
single file on the off chance that one of them needs keywords expanded.

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4720 Boston Way
Lanham, MD 20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5747
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