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Re: Outsider impression about merge tracking

From: Karl Fogel <kfogel_at_red-bean.com>
Date: 2007-11-19 17:59:27 CET

Folker Schamel <schamel23@spinor.com> writes:
> I'm reluctant sending this mail, because I have a huge respect
> for the Subversion developers. But maybe sometimes some outsider view
> is helpful:
>
> I fear that subversion team is going to slap some premature merge-tracking
> feature out.

Thanks for your concerns! Of course we worry about that too, and are
trying to make merging Do The Right Thing as much as possible.

> Which in practice will causes serious headaches and dissatisfaction for users
> due to many open issues. (Also a good documentation of the limitations
> of merge-tracking won't prevent this.)
>
> And for such kind of non-trivial algorithmic problems, usually you cannot
> fix broken implementations afterwards, but the only chance is to
> (re)implement a clean solution from the beginning.

Well, your statements are true in general, but they'll only be helpful
if you give specific examples. Which is more work, of course; it's
also the only way to get constructive results.

> Is commercial pressure driving the subversion code base in a dead end?

No. Better merging is something Subversion has needed for a long
time; it's an area where we lag behind other version control systems
(both proprietary and open source). We need it.

While there are certainly corporations that want to see the feature
finished, and some of them are helping to develop it (e.g., CollabNet,
Google, et al), I don't see commercial pressure causing any problems
here. The community is setting the deadlines and making the technical
decisions in public forums, as always.

I too am worried, but mainly about technical issues that I think are
fixeable (e.g., issue #2897, etc). Can you be more specific?

-Karl

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Received on Mon Nov 19 17:59:38 2007

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