Re: Easy comparisons between related trunks, branches, and tags

On Sat, 12 Nov 2005, Jim Blandy wrote:
> [Marc Sherman's projectroot+treeroot proposal] is the
> simplest I've seen so far that addresses the problem for most
> traditionally-structured repositories.

Agreed.

> If you've got your parallel trees scattered around more, it won't work
> as well, but maybe the answer is "don't do that".

"Don't do that" is not very nice advice to people trying to migrate from
CVS to subversion, because they may already have branches that don't
cover the entire project. However, perhaps some cleverness (and more
complex configuration capabilities) in cvs2svn would be good enough.

> I'd like to hear how other folks feel about this proposal. Is it
> general enough? Does it restrict people from doing valuable things?

It's not as general as Greg's rewrite rules. Two features that rewrite
rules could offer that are missing from the projectroot+treeroot
proposal are:

   The ability to have branches that cover only a subset of the project;

   The ability to map from short nicknames to longer branch names (e.g.
   a rewrite rule could map from "B#foo" to "branches/gcc-foo-branch",
   while the projectroot+treeroot proposal would require the user to
   specify '+branches/gcc-foo-branch").

From a syntax point of view, adding "+" as a reserved character at the
start of a path seems less safe than adding "#" as a reserved character
in a revision name.

I still want to use syntax like "diff -r branch filename" rather than
"diff --old +branch --new filename", but that could probably be made to
work without changing the way dirprops are used by this proposal.

In summary: The projectroot+treeroot proposal is probably good enough
for most users, but I still prefer the rewrite rules proposal (or
rather, I prefer something like what the rewrite rules proposal could
become if it were written up in more detail).

--apb (Alan Barrett)

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Received on Sun Nov 13 09:48:48 2005