Re: Tags and branches are NOT the same

Stuart Celarier wrote:
> John, I think you've overlooked some use cases for tags. Here are three
> to consider.
>
I've seen a lot of comments on additional use cases for tags. It seems
most of them can be summarized in the following three use cases:

   1. Tags as pure symbolic revisions (snapshot in time)
   2. Tags as proper subsets of files within a revision (a snapshot in
time and space)
   3. Tags as subsets of files with mixed revisions (a snapshot of a
corrupt work area)

Hmmm... sounds like CVS to me. The fact is that over the years, people
appear to have tapped the absolute limits of the tagging facilities of
CVS, regardless of what the original designers' intents were. This
stands to reason - there is a LOT of history behind CVS, and where
there's a will, there's a way! :)

BTW, I used the term "corrupt" in point 3 above loosely to mean a work
area that cannot be recreated with any automated operation provided by
the version control system. Human intervention is required to ensure
that all files exist in the work area at the desired revision.

I would also like to point out that (in CVS anyway) a tag associated
with a proper subset of files would never recreate a duplicate of any
historical representation of the repository. This is because files that
were not associated with the specified tag would enter the work area
from the HEAD revision, and this is constantly changing as commits occur.

Now I put this question to the list: *Are there additional things that
people would like to do with a potential tagging feature in Subversion
that CVS tags did not allow? *This question moves us beyond a discussion
of things people have been using tags for in the past, and into a
discussion of what people would like to see in a Subversion tagging feature.

Also, please do correct me if I didn't cover every possible use case of
CVS tags above.

John

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