I just don't get this.
Virtually everyone will concede that Subversion's copies, and CVS tags
wind up being the same thing. SVN probably takes up significantly less
repository space due to the O(1) architecture. That same architecture
causes a few limitations, such as not knowing what tags exist for a
particular revision, but that isn't what has been talked about recently.
Personally, I think that representing tags as copies is superior because
it can leverage all of the existing UI. You do not have to invent a
special UI to access the tags. Anyone that builds a repository browser of
any kind, can automatically access the same info etc... If you do not
want tags "cluttering your UI", then spend some more time thinking out
your layout, as it ought to be fairly easy to deal with this.
As for being able to move the tags later, simply use svn delete and svn
copy to recreate or update. You do not need to do a merge. Besides being
more difficult, a merge will take up space for the new versions, where a
delete/copy takes virtually none.
As for aliases, I think it is something that could be addressed once there
is a general mechanism to push information from the server down to the
client, such as configuration data. Once repositories have this sort of
feature, it seems like it wouldn't be too difficult to make aliases
something that could be configured and stored in that same area and then
leveraged by the UI. Until then, if you really need it, you can get the
same feature by defining and using the aliases in your shell.
I see little benefit in inventing new UI and metadata for features that
already work well, and are just a bit foreign to users who have used other
tools. Eventually, there will be people looking to do cheap copies in
those tools :)
To me, the only legitimate issue that has been raised is the lack of
visibility of where something has been copied to. This sounds like a hard
problem to solve if a O(1) architecture is to remain. I would rather have
the cheap copies and figure out a way to solve that other problem. I am
sure someone will think of some way to solve that.
Mark
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Received on Fri Sep 24 17:55:03 2004