Re: Tortoise is Beatiful - Job / Contract opportunity for TortoiseSVN related project.

Stefan Küng wrote:
> Jay Crouch wrote:

> You know that you can mount a Subversion repository (hosted on apache)
> in explorer as a web folder? When you do that, the user doesn't even
> realize that the folder isn't a normal folder, and still every "save"
> creates a new revision in the repository. I think it can't get simpler
> than that :)

DAV is nice, but requires applications to support it. Ever tried to open
a .txt file on a DAV folder with Notepad? See? ;-)

I think a nicer approach could be a disk driver. For some really
interesting applications, have a look at

   http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/

and there particularly at HttpDisk.

The same concept has been used, I believe, to transparently mount Amazon
S3 as the storage provider - so why not write a "native" driver with
subversion backing store?

The ultimate problem with these approaches seems to be that most
"interesting" operations would really benefit from "annotations" (e.g.
commit comments, branching, tagging, atomicity of change sets etc) -
well, at least to the extent I have thought this through.

Using Subversion "transparently" is about as useful as the
(copy-on-write) snapshot functionality a (wonderful) NAS device I owned
for a short time offers (Infrant ReadyNAS - need storage? get it.).

I see the same thing with Microsoft Sharepoint (SPS/WSS) - you can turn
on versioning on "Shared Documents" (well, document folders). But, tell
you what: It's rather useless, at least as shipped, simply because there
is nothing in there to "manage" the version! And have you ever tried to
compare different revisions of an Excel sheet? Yuck! :-)

I feel that only those users educated about good version control
practices will benefit from it. And those users in all likelihood will
be very happy using TortoiseSVN.

Sorry for the rambling :-)

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Received on Fri Sep 15 22:42:15 2006