May I say that TSVN is a very nice piece of work, and a joy to use....
A couple of change requests I would like to suggest, if I may...
1. Although I appreciate that (sorta) SVN:EXTERNAL and Unix symlinks can
help here, what would really be useful is the ability to link files or
directories together to allow the same component to be 'symbolically
linked' inside the repository to multiple folder locations.
In this context, revisions to a linked component would affect all linked
copies. The browser, ideally, would distinguish linked items with a
unique icon, and enable the user to determine the linked paths to all
other occurrences of the linked item.
This functionality would permit multiple tree views to be established on
a common repository. This is most useful when using SVN as a
documentation control system rather than specifically for source code
control and allows different audiences to view the information in
different ways e.g by customer, by release etc. but still retain a
common revision history. At present you can of course copy the tree but
you then lose coherent history as soon as the copy is updated.
i.e
Project1
Folder1
Item1
Folder1 is linked to a different part of the tree so that
Project2
FolderX
Item1
FolderX, although named differently, is actually linked to folder1 in
Project1. Now any change to the folder or its subfolders or items would
be reflected in the revision log of either \Project1\folder1 or
\Project2\folderX because the two items are linked.
2. The ability to search the repository from the repo-browser for a
specific property and value would greatly increase the utility of this
feature. This would be a recursive search from the selected root folder,
and ideally allow wild cards or regular expressions for both property
name and value, as well as possibly the ability to define a search time
as a boolean against more than one property or value.
I note in this context that 'search log' cannot (afaik) recurse and this
also would be very useful to enhance, so that the log could be
recursively searched from any root folder selected as the starting
point.
Ideally, the browser should also permit full text search on the tree.
Since many files are binary, this would have to work a bit like DIFF in
that you would need to specify a 'grep' command that works for each file
type; any file for which this doesn't exist will not be searchable. Then
the browser will recurse from the selected root, invoking the specified
'grep' for each item found,. and collating the results so that you can
then select any component from the search result list.
These changes greatly augment the use of SVN as a documentation control
system, for which it is well suited. They are also useful in a source
code control context but anyone managing source code also has tons of
specs and other documents that SVN would manage very well - these extra
features would make it a killer application for documentation
management.
Andrew Mayo
Development Manager
Cegedim Rx (Chertsey)
Tel: +44 (0) 1932 736860
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plc
Received on Wed Sep 5 18:16:50 2007