C. Michael Pilato wrote:
> Blair Zajac wrote:
>> C. Michael Pilato wrote:
>>> Blair Zajac wrote:
>>>> I'm not saying people can't modify it, that's fine, I'm saying, why are
>>>> we allowing people to remove it? There's a lot of tools that presume
>>>> the existence of svn:date.
>>> I think we can pretty much guarantee that every tool that presumes the
>>> existence of svn:date was conceived and composed after svn:date -- by
>>> virtue
>>> of being implemented as a mutable, unversioned revision property --
>>> was made
>>> optional. This project needn't bear the responsibility for decisions
>>> made
>>> by others who weren't diligent enough to check their assumptions against
>>> reality.
>> Where does it say that? Even I was surprised to see that its optional
>> and I work on this project :) I wouldn't fault other projects from
>> making the same assumption.
>
> Allow me to turn this around on you: where does "it" say "that" 'svn:date'
> will always be around?
>
> We provide a collection of property manipulation APIs. Those APIs allow
> properties to be created, modified, and *deleted*. Not a single one of
> those APIs describes or implies the presence of any special handling for
> certain properties. So if you or someone else assumed that the APIs behaved
> otherwise, you did so without any hints from the APIs themselves.
Dear book authors: perhaps we can head off future instances of this problem
by stating explicitly in the book that Subversion does not require, assume,
or go out of its way to preserve the existence of *any* revision properties.
--
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
CollabNet <> www.collab.net <> Distributed Development On Demand
Received on 2008-09-27 22:38:34 CEST