Re: Problems with the documentation of Subversion dump format

On 12/29/2011 11:09 PM, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
> Steinar Bang wrote on Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 22:55:09 +0100:
>> Couldn't you just store this information as custom properties? Even
>> though svn isn't able to use it, at least the information would be
>> preserved...?
>>
> Re "throw away the domains": svn:author properties be set to any
> byte-string which is NUL-terminated UTF-8 that doesn't contain
> (0x0D).

With the caveat being that tools that assume that svn:author was set by
the Subversion API may no longer recognize the author...

We're still being hit by this, but choosing to take this hit. Our
identifiers are not easily legible ("1234567"), so we translate
svn:author to "Full Name (GID)" format during commit. Tools such as
Crucible/FishEye can sort of work with this via the committer mappings.

Just mentioning as I think the "svn:author" being one arbitrary
byte-string with no specification defining how structure can be added in
a portable way that tools should understand and support means that it
really isn't that flexible. It is a compromise.

In the case of GIT -> SVN, the retaining of the information could be a
valid compromise. But it is still a loss of information, at least as far
as how tools such as Crucible/FishEye might interpret the content.

-- 
Mark Mielke<mark_at_mielke.cc>