Hello everyone.
I have read what has been said in the past about ignoring versioned
files, that they shouldn't be versioned in the first place and that
the file should be added under a different name, as a template, to
be modified in every checked, manually or via script.
I like to present a few arguments against this (oddly puristic)
point of view (I also added this as a feature request to the
subversion issue tracker, issue 3028, but since we are using
TortoiseSVN exclusively I would be helped with support for this in
TortoiseSVN already):
###
------- Additional comments from canhuth@tigris.org Thu Nov 22
02:53:47 -0800 2007 -------
From the FAQ: "I have a file in my project that every developer
must change, but I don't want those local mods to ever be committed.
How can I make 'svn commit' ignore the file?"
The suggested solution is to use platform specific scripts to
"initialize" the working copy/checkout.
This is however platform specific and requires maintenance effort.
This is also impractical for a large number of files which are not
to be checked in.
For example we have a complete Eclipse instance in our svn
repository and we want to ignore every change in its directory and
below. Because Eclipse more or less at random creates and deletes
file from its own directory we have no way of knowing which
individual files may be change or deleted by starting Eclipse.
To avoid that an update creates files again that were deleted by
running Eclipse the ignore setting I am asking for should also apply
to updates. (The latter might possibly have to be optional.)
Also, when the user forgets to run the init script after a checkout
(and possibly after an update, which might add further files that
must be renamed for things work properly) applications might
misbehave when they do not find their expected files.
All these efforts and concerns would be solved by an ignore
functionality that applies to checkout and commit as well, as
described above.
###
It has been argued by someone in 2004 on this mailing list that such
a feature would break the number one rule of subversion, which is
claimed to be "never loose data".
I wonder if and how this can apply to our situation with Eclipse,
and I wonder if it shouldn't be my choice to make in the first
place. Putting such a setting in the advanced settings, placing
warnings all over the place, but completely avoiding me from making
my SVN configurations as simple to use as possible for my co-workers
is not pragmatic.
Someone from the Netherlands suggested to allow to specify glob
patterns which deselect files in the commit dialog if they match the
pattern. I find this a very good compromise, which would be
acceptable for our developers, too.
With best regards
clemens
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Received on Thu Nov 22 13:50:48 2007