[svn.haxx.se] · SVN Dev · SVN Users · SVN Org · TSVN Dev · TSVN Users · Subclipse Dev · Subclipse Users · this month's index

Re: Mnemomic names for revisions

From: David Gómez <david_at_pleyades.net>
Date: 2005-05-05 11:13:13 CEST

Hi H.S ;)

On May 03 at 04:56:41, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Excuse me for chiming in here, but I'd like to say I agree with this,
> too. IMHO, we should not confuse symbolic revisions with tags (in the
> CVS sense).

That's true, we're not talking about the 'cvs tag' command, but just
about symbolic names for revisions.

> Subversion is essentially a filesystem with full history over time.
> The reason we want a filesystem with time history is so that we can
> retrieve the state of the filesystem as it was at time X. But since
> the history of the filesystem generally has a lot of checkpoints (lots
> of commits), it is infeasible for a user to keep track of which
> checkpoints (revision numbers) are of interest. In fact, in the ideal
> case we *don't want* to require the user to play with revision
> numbers.

Fully agree.

> Of course, we can just copy the files to /tags/3.0-beta and then refer
> to that instead, but IMHO this defeats the whole purpose of having a
> filesystem history. The directory /tags/3.0-beta is a particular part
> of the filesystem *at the present time*, whereas what I want is "what
> does the filesystem look like at the time of revision 7391"? - i.e. I
> want to access the *history* of the filesystem at some particular
> landmark; I don't care about what it looks like *now*.

Exactly. What's the need to add a "reference" (svn copy) to a particular
revision of the repository, when that it's already solved by the
revision system? We just need a symbolic name, to be able to remember
the revision we want to checkout from the repository.

> It seems rather unfortunate to me that while I can do precisely this
> (accessing a specific point in the filesystem's history) if I use raw
> revision numbers, yet I can't give names to these numbers.

It is :(

> capability is already there; it just needs better usability. IMHO, we
> should move away from using revision numbers---let the machine take
> care of that; human beings handle names better than numbers.

True.

regards,

-- 
David Gómez                                      Jabber ID: davidge@jabber.org
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Thu May 5 11:11:50 2005

This is an archived mail posted to the Subversion Users mailing list.

This site is subject to the Apache Privacy Policy and the Apache Public Forum Archive Policy.