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Re: proposal: changelist feature

From: Julian Foad <julianfoad_at_btopenworld.com>
Date: 2006-04-20 21:42:57 CEST

Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> Here's my plea: let me make a feature branch, and code this really
> simple bookkeeping feature. Once you've all played with it and
> discovered how (unexpectedly) useful it is, we can go back and visit
> some of these other more complex feature proposals in new mail
> threads...

I have no problem with you making a branch on which to try out your ideas, as
long as you and we realise that doing so does not increase the likelihood of us
accepting those ideas.

As you develop it, also write the documentation and/or specification. (They
should be more or less the same as each other.) If thoroughly written, this
will show up clearly how well the idea fits in with Subversion's existing concepts.

I think you will find that what you are implementing is a "file list" rather
than a "change list". "File list" functionality is already partly handled by
the "--targets" option and perhaps just needs extending somewhat. We certainly
don't want to promote the idea that a "change" in Subversion can be represented
as a list of files.

> [...] (Yes, it could be done by users keeping changelists in a bunch
> of text-files, but it wouldn't be as convenient, and 'svn status'
> wouldn't be able to show them, which is the critical bit for me.)

Let's make 'svn status' accept the '--targets FILELISTFILE' option anyway. I
think all commands that accept an arbitrary number of targets should accept it.

Then see whether it really wouldn't be as convenient. If you're happy to use
'svn status --targets CHANGELIST' as the way to show files belonging to a
certain list, I think your feature requires only the addition of something like:

svn changelist CHANGELIST FILE...
   (basically 'echo FILE... >> CHANGELIST')

I feel the management of such file-list files should not be a first-class
operation in Subversion and would better be handled by external utilities.

May I urge you to try out an implementation based on such file-list files, and
see how well it works.

- Julian

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Received on Thu Apr 20 21:45:46 2006

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