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Re: CVS/SVN comparison

From: Peter Williams <peterw_at_aurema.com>
Date: 2004-10-25 00:20:34 CEST

Jeremy Pereira wrote:
>
> On Oct 24, 2004, at 01:40, Scott Palmer wrote:
>
>>
>> On Oct 23, 2004, at 5:24 AM, Jeremy Pereira wrote:
>>
>>> What is a tag? It's a copy of a module at a particular point in its
>>> life cycle.
>>>
>>> Seen this way, the appalling hack that is CVS tags becomes obvious.
>>
>>
>> I disagree with your definition of tag. I view a tag as a 'label' is
>> in VSS, a label is not a copy. A label marks the repository at a
>> particular time. I can make a copy of the trunk without subversion's
>> copy feature if I want. But I can't put a label on the trunk at a
>> particular time in its development, subversion doesn't appear to
>> support that. Moving the label to a different revision should be
>> possible but hard to do my mistake.
>
>
> You're still fixated on the implementation details.

I think that you're the one that's guilty of this.

> What you really
> want is to preserve the state of the code at a certain point in time.
> Whether you do it by labelling it or by taking a copy is immaterial.

But tags and branches are two different/separate high level concepts.
The CVS implementation of these two concepts may have its problems but
at least it recognizes them as two separate concepts and tries to
implement them. SVN doesn't even try to implement them.

SVN's copy mechanism is a low level operation which could (probably) be
used implement tags and branches but SVN stops short of actually
implementing the high level tag and branch concepts and leaves it to the
user.

>
> As it happens, svn copy does not actually create a physical copy of the
> files unless you change them in the copy. In terms of implementation
> you have just labelled it.

Irrelevant implementation detail of a low level operation.

>
> The only real criticism I see is that it's hard in subversion to make
> the copy read only.

And you have to remember the full path to the copy. Doing the donkey
work is supposed to be the computer's job but SVN forces the users to do
a lot of donkey work themselves.

Peter

-- 
Dr Peter Williams, Chief Scientist                peterw@aurema.com
Aurema Pty Limited                                Tel:+61 2 9698 2322
PO Box 305, Strawberry Hills NSW 2012, Australia  Fax:+61 2 9699 9174
79 Myrtle Street, Chippendale NSW 2008, Australia http://www.aurema.com
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Received on Mon Oct 25 00:21:30 2004

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