On 1/24/07, Glenn Carr <GCarr@connectship.com> wrote:
> Just wanted to tag on to Alexander's thread below, and ask some basic questions about changelists. I know that Perforce uses them and I hear about other users such as Alexander who swear by them, but I've not used them and am curious as to why they are so appealing.
>
> Can someone give me a good overview?
I am not familiar with Perforce, but judging from this
http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.042/manuals/p4guide/07_changelists.html
Perforce changelists are different from subversion ones and are
partially a kludge workaround for the lack of cheap branches ;-)
Below are my use cases for subversion changelists:
1) Working on two or more issues in the same working copy. This is
actually the LEAST compelling of the use cases, to the point where one
might argue that topic branches must be used instead, and VCS should
not encourage sloppy software development practices.
However, because Subversion is a centralized VCS, in the case of
temporarily lost connection changelist might come handy. In fact, this
is a primary motivation to Subversion developers, according to their
design document:
http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/notes/changelist-design.txt
2) Simplifying commit separation -- many projects have layered
architectures with supporting polices. In particular, it is often
required to commit changes to each layer separately. New Tortoise UI
might help greatly here -- the only worry I have is that changelists
seem to include only files, while I want to also use directories
and/or file masks.
3) "Permanently local" modifications -- there are cases when developer
wishes to modify certain files, but does NOT plan to ever submit them
to repository. The most frequent cases are probably debugging
modifications and local configuration modifications. Again, I have a
worry here -- it seems that there is no way to exclude a change list
from commit. At least that problem can be rather easily solved on
Tortoise level.
--
Alexander S. Klenin
Insight Experts Ltd.
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Received on Tue Jan 23 20:34:10 2007