Re: A concern about mergeinfo and compatability.

David Glasser wrote:
> On Jan 29, 2008 8:22 AM, C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net> wrote:
>> I'd like to avoid dump/load, but we can't retroactively prevent users of 1.4
>> clients from setting the svn:mergeinfo property on their 1.4-pedigreed
>> repositories.
>
> Also, I'm just unconvinced that this is something we need to worry
> about. I'm pretty sure we've set up the RA capabilities so that 1.5
> clients won't try to automatically set "svn:mergeinfo" on repositories
> that aren't being served by 1.5 servers (and we can involved the
> version number too), so it comes down to "what if somebody manually
> runs 'svn ps svn:mergeinfo'?" And, well, it's in our namespace. We
> reserve the right to make it do weird things. It's the same sort of
> complaint as "With svn 1.0 I decided to set the svn:special property
> on a file containing the word 'link'! How come it's now turning my
> files into symlinks?"

I don't think things are as simple as that. Our documentation for
Subversion 1.5 will almost certainly call out the fact that the property was
intentionally designed to be hand-tweakable. We can't say that and then
expect users to understand that when they do exactly what we've told them,
they get different results than we tell them they'd get.

-- 
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
CollabNet   <>   www.collab.net   <>   Distributed Development On Demand