> From: "Jeremy Pereira" <jeremy.pereira@ntlworld.com>
> To: "Subversion Users" <users@subversion.tigris.org>; "Scott Palmer" <scott.palmer@2connected.org>
> Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 9:30 AM
> Subject: Re: newbie revision question
>
> Why is it that people can't see past the tags thing? Can I remind
> everybody that tags themselves are a bad hack introduced into CVS
> because of its poor design i.e. CVS is a tool to manage a collection of
> standalone files which are each under revision control *separately*
> rather than a single code tree which is under revision control.
>
> The underlying function that Josh Howe is asking for is to preserve a
> copy of his tree as it was at the time of release 1.0. Leaving aside
> all considerations of implementation, to me the "copy the tree to a
> special place calling it revision 1.0" seems the more natural metaphor
> than the "label a particular revision release 1.0". At least in this
> instance, it is tags that are the workaround not svn copy.
>
> Some people seem to be coming up with ideas like "x is difficult in
> subversion, but if we had tags, it'd be easy". This may be true, but
> the question should be "can we fix x without grafting on extra kludgy
> UI metaphors?"
>
> One of the reasons I like subversion so much is it presents me with an
> elegant simple conceptual model which is actually more powerful than my
> previous version control system (CVS). If it were my project, it'd
> break my heart to have to implement something as nasty as tags.
>
> NB I don't call my tags directory "tags", I call it "releases" which
> reflects better what it is for.
I agree that the copy metaphor is elegant, inexpensive, and fast
(though I haven't tried it on a large repository yet, but I take
the word of everyone.) I think it's a good thing. Kudos to the
SVN development team. Thinking back on 90 minute tags of large
repositories makes me appreciate the SVN solution (though a long
lunch isn't bad, either.)
The SVN mission statement (I paraphrase) is to be a better CVS.
To me, the crux of the issue (it's not really a "problem") is in
CVS there are two kinds of tags: branch tags and static tags.
They exist for two fundamentally different purposes.
Yes, it has been properly noted that in CVS you are allowed to
"-F"orcefully move a static tag.
In general:
Branch tag = a moving target
Static tag = not a moving target
I'm sure most of us have used the -F option to "cvs tag", and
it surely has its uses. Clearly, SVN has that mechanism
already built in. :-)
Personally, I'm not asking for (nasty) tags or labels.
I'd like to see an SVN-built-in way to keep a directory
hierarchy from being committed to. That's it. Make it
SVN-read-only. No external scripts or wrappers should be
required to do this. There should be a way to override
the read-only decision, a la "cvs tag -F", but you should
have to make a real conscious decision to do so.
Raye.
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Received on Mon Sep 27 19:33:06 2004