Dear all,
I have a few questions on the way subversion handles copied and moved files
that arose when I was revising our repository.
Let me fist give a short description of the starting point of my work:
Parts of our repository are already more than 5 years old and were generated
by a person formerly supervising the project. Also, the directory and file
structure was generated by my predecessor.
Thus, as over the years things change, I decided to revise the structure of
our system. No problem, I had just "updated" from CVS to subversion to handle
these kind of things.
What I wanted to do is:
Rename directories and files (by moving them) and
Split files into two more logical units (by copying and editing them)
I did all this in my local working copy trying to check the results of my
changes prior to a commit. While I did that, other developers changed the
files I had moved or copied, but unfortunately, the changes of them didn't
find their way into my copies or moved files. In the case of copied files the
changes only were merged into the first file and not into the copy. In the
case of the moved files the "svn update" command simply recreated the source
file of the prior "svn move" command.
Finally I ended up with importing the changes done to the source files into my
copied and moved files by hand, which I thought was a lot of unnecessary
work!
After that my team had a very long discussion on this topic and the opinions
were very diverse concerning the usefulness of a copy command which cannot
handle this kind of problem. I personally think that there should be a way to
let the changes of files I have copied or moved find their way into the new
files. Subversion knows where the files were copied or moved...
My questions:
1) Is it possible to make a "linked copy" or "linked move" of a file which
receives all changes to the source file in the repository until I commit the
new file? (This is important for the split and rename operations)
2) If not, why?
3) Was there a way to ease the work a had to do after the problems occured?
4) Would the branch/merge mechanism help in situations like this, keeping me
from doing the changes by hand?
5) After moving files to a new location, they still contain their log entries,
which is very nice. But a "svn cat" command to an older revision fails, as
the new name of the file is unknown in the revisions previous to the move. Is
their a way to let subversion handle the filename translation to the name of
the file in the old revision, instead of parsing the logs and looking for the
old filename?
Best,
Patrick Heinemann
--
Dipl.-Technoinform. Patrick Heinemann
Universitaet Tuebingen, WSI - RA, Sand 1, D-72076 Tuebingen, Germany
Phone: ( +49 / 0 ) 70 71 / 29 - 78 989 Fax: ( +49 / 0 ) 70 71 / 29 - 50 91
mailto:heinemann@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de
http://www-ra.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de
Attempto Tübingen - Robot Soccer Team
http://www-ra.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/forschung/robocup/welcome_e.html
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Received on Fri Apr 22 17:53:33 2005