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Re: early reflections on subversion methodology

From: Branko Čibej <brane_at_xbc.nu>
Date: 2005-08-01 23:03:07 CEST

David Weintraub wrote:

>So, it seems rather strange that Subversion doesn't understand the
>built in concepts of branches and tags. Instead, these items are
>merely emulated via pseudo-directories. After all, tags and branches
>have been implemented as part of version control systems since RCS
>back in 1985.
>
>
Subversion certainly does understand branches and tags. The important
feature of branches (and tags -- these are just branches that are never
changed after creation) is that they establish a (named) parallel line
of development that tracks its ancestry and can expose ancestry
information to procedures that need it, e.g., merge.

 From what I've been able to gather from this thread, people are either
upset or confused because directories and branches share the same
namespace, whilst most other VC systems in use today have a separate
namespace for branches.

But this is in fact just a UI detail. It does not meant that SVN doesn't
"support" branches, and it certainly doesn't make SVN's branches
second-class objects. There's also a huge benefit in having a single
namespace -- namely, WebDAV/DeltaV interoperability. We'd have had a lot
more trouble getting that if we had more than one namespace.

-- Brane

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Received on Mon Aug 1 23:05:26 2005

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