Re: No-op changes no longer dumped by 'svnadmin dump' in 1.9

Daniel Shahaf wrote:
> Johan Corveleyn wrote:
>> [...], revision N-1 contains a real
>> change, but only a short log message; and revision N has a no-op
>> change to that same path, and a very informative log message [...]
>
> The FreeBSD project used to intentionally make no-op commits (they term it
> "forced commits") as part of their new committer workflow. I don't know
> whether they still do that.

We need to be careful with terminology. We're not talking about a
no-op commit, we're talking about a path that is marked as 'changed'
within a commit, but whose content did not change. (The same commit
might or might not also contain other paths that have real changes.)

In fact, I think one of the first things we need to do is a precise
analysis of the issue:

  * What exactly are the existing possible forms of 'no-op change'
that any part of Subversion can represent?
    - Text-change?
    - Props-change?
    - Whole-node-change?
    - Commit? (not so interesting in the current issue)
    - Only certain combinations of those?

  * At which APIs can each those changes be (a) made and (b) seen?
    - FS API?
    - Repos API?
    - RA and client-side APIs?
    - svnadmin dump/load?
    - svnrdump dump/load?
    - svnsync?

- Julian
Received on 2015-09-22 12:55:44 CEST