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

On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 08:09:54AM -0500, Marc Sherman wrote:
> Alan Barrett wrote:

> >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;

> Jim's suggested a way to expand the proposal to cover this; the value of
> the treeroot property is the subpath that's branched. For trees
> branched from the root, it's empty.

I have to say that Jim's suggestion does not seem to overly complicate
things, in fact it seems like a clean generalization of your proposal.
And since it does cover some significant uses of branches it seems worth
it.

> > 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").

I think I have a nice generalization of your proposal to achieve these
short branch nicknames. (If that is desirable as you doubt below is
another question.)

The projectrule property could contain a mapping from nicknames to
subdirs, eg:

crazy branches/users/jim/experimental/crazy
beta branches/beta
a branches/alpha

In contrast to decorating the treeroots with nickname props this
prevents inefficient searches for the actual tree location and it makes
naming conflicts immediatly apparent since they happen in a single file.

> This, on the other hand, I explicitly didn't want to include in my
> proposal. IMO, general aliasing should be the province of something
> like "svn ln". If the alias is useful for "svn diff", it should be
> useful for "svn co" as well, and a rewrite rule doesn't help there.

I agree that subversion-managed intra-repository links are conceptually
much nicer (eg they could immediatly flag when a "nickname branch" turns
stale). OTOH, I don't know if I'd like my project root dir littered
with all current nickname links...

-- 
Chris Stork   <>  Support eff.org!  <>   http://www.ics.uci.edu/~cstork/
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