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

From: Branko Čibej <brane_at_apache.org>
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2015 11:44:11 +0200

On 23.09.2015 11:03, Johan Corveleyn wrote:
> TBH, I'm not really interested in having a really fundamental
> discussion about this (but feel free to drive that of course). What I
> am interested in, is that we have a regression, and that 'dump' is
> losing information (namely, not dumping correctly null-text-changes).

Well, without a "really fundamental" discussion you can't really decide
if it's a regression or a bug fix.

> I think the dump.c part of r1572363 and r1573111 should be reverted /
> fixed so that we get the previous behaviour again, and this should be
> backported to 1.9. At this point, IMO 'svnadmin dump' is broken in
> 1.9.

What we really should determine is whether recording no-op node changes
in the repository was intentional or just an unfortunate site-effect of
something or other. I'm leaning towards the latter, which would make the
1.9 change in 'svnadmin dump' a bugfix.

The point is that Subversion is supposed to track changes to a tree of
nodes (directories and files). Unlike empty revisions, no-op changes
have no useful value for either working copies or repository history.

> Just one small addition on the fundamental part: I still think (like
> we discussed during breakfast last Friday in Berlin :-)) there is no
> problem in having / preserving / exposing null-text-changes to paths
> in Subversion. I think we have to, for backwards compatibility, and I
> see no problem in doing so. And to answer the last question you posed
> me last Friday: the reverse diff of a null-text-changed-path is
> identical to the forward diff: a diff with no changed lines :-).

There is no problem with recording such changes, but the real question
is whether they have any useful semantics. Backwards compatibility does
not mean hanging on to every silly decision we've ever made as if our
(or our users') lives depended on it.

We've already made (IMO) more questionable changes; for example,
forbidding control characters in file names was in no small way driven
by the fact that our dump format can't represent them. So instead of
fixing the dump format we decided to break old repositories. That's a
far more serious change than dropping no-op node changes from the dump file.

-- Brane
Received on 2015-09-23 11:44:17 CEST

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