The sparse-directories document is a bit out-dated in several points, which
is gotten cleared during the implementation later.
The design section in that document refers to a "depth" in .svn/entries and
a --depth option which sets the depth value. However, things have been
changed. There are two different depths in the implementation. The first is
the depth of the operation, and the second is just the one mentioned in the
document, the depth of the WC. As a result, the examples of 'svn up --depth'
in the document should be read as 'svn up --set-depth'.
*******
The following knowledge is not gained from the source code (not yet), but
from the help message in the development-build (trunk r30114). Correct me if
my statement is wrong.
*******
The depth of the operation limits the region affected by the operation. That
is what the --depth option in command line actually means. Commands that
accept a -N or -R switch in the old days are all modified to take a --depth
option. A large majority (19 out of 33) of commands gets influenced, much
more than the five listed in the "User interface" section of the document.
The modification should be trivial for commands that do not affect the tree
structure of WC and thus do not deserve further explanation. These take up
15 of the 19 affected commands. The last four commands which (may) need more
attention are checkout, switch, update and merge. (PS: What does the
chagelist command do? It seems to be a new command introduced in the develop
version.)
There is a paragraph in the "Current Status" talking about the depth of
operation:
<===========QUOTE=============>
On the server side, most of the significant changes are in
libsvn_repos/reporter.c. The code that receives update reports now
receives notice of paths that have different depths from their
parent, and of course the overall update operation has a global
depth, which applies whenever not shadowed by some local depth for
a given path.
<=========ENE OF QUOTE========>
This describes how the depth of operation works. The "shadowed" means that,
if a directory in WC is covered by the depth of operation, the depth of that
local path will take control in the operation of the subtree. It implies
that if there is a sub-directory A of infinity depth in current directory, a
'svn up --depth=immediates' will cover the whole subtree beneath A. I'm not
sure if this applies to all other commands. The merge command should be
quite different as described below.
Both the switch and update command have a separate --set-depth option used
to update the depth of WC, or the target of the command (such as current
directory), to be more precise.
However, the checkout command is a bit special. It takes only --depth option
to both constrain the region of operation and set the depth of the WC. In
other words, the semantic of --depth option in the checkout command is
different the one in other commands. A clarification may be needed, either
change a proper name or at least update the description of the option.
The merge command is special that the modification made by this command is
local to the WC and need to be committed. Thus the modification should be
totally accepted by the WC. New subtree will be accepted in a depth of
infinity. The depth of existing tree will not be modified. (Am I right? I'm
not very sure about this.)
How does the --set-depth option influence the subtree when some of the
sub-directories have different depth from the root is an important question.
The examples in the document do not cover this enough, more investigation is
needed.
Rui, Guo
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe_at_subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help_at_subversion.tigris.org
Received on 2008-03-31 19:19:57 CEST