The new 'move' heuristics in the log APIs

Hi Stefan Fuhrmann.

Regarding the new 'move' functionality supporting heuristic detection of moves in the log APIs, that you added a few months ago, am I right in thinking this is experimental? At least part of it is marked so.

The APIs and UI we're talking about include at least:

  'svn log --auto-moves' option -- this is working, as far as it goes

  svn_fs_path_change_kind_t -- new
move-related fields to support the above

  svn_fs_move() -- marked experimental, not used?

It looks to me that the benefit of these to end users is pretty small at the moment. It has the ability to mark certain changes as moves in the "log -v" changes list, but the heuristic is rather weak, and more importantly the log 'changes list' is the only place where it identifies moves -- it doesn't touch on any ability to send moves as moves in a diff, merge, update, and so on.

I have been studying how we could fully support moves and I think, while deducing them heuristically can be of some use, in the end we are going to want a more far-reaching, deeper set of changes and it is most likely that we won't need exactly this kind of API.

So I think, like Stefan Sperling said [1], it should probably be reverted or moved to a branch or somehow hidden from public release, in 1.9.

What do you think?
- Julian

[1] Email from Stefan Sperling on 2014-04-07, subject "Re: 1.9.0-alpha2 up for testing/signing", archived at e.g. <http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2014-04/0107.shtml>.
Received on 2014-04-07 19:27:20 CEST