Re: early reflections on subversion methodology

Regarding revision-numbers versus tags ...

Is it possible that repo-wide revision is the opposite extreme from
file-specific revisions? If version are repo-wide, than it forces a
certain mapping and usage strategies for using multiple related projects
or "components".

If a repository is a file-system, does it make sense to have some kind
of not-to-coarse and not-to-fine granularity of "grouping" that is
somewhat less than the entire repository and somewhat more than a single
file?

If it were a completely logical (as opposed to physical) grouping, we'd
have to allow "cherry picking" of individual files and directories into
logical "components" - which sounds a bit too much of a stretch for the
filesystem-based versioning architecture.

But if one chose a more physical (file-system centric) middle point of
granularity, then a subtree of the repository, rooted at a particular
directory, might be a good candidate. The current externals mechanism
allows mapping to something that looks like this, tho its not quite the
same thing.

ClearCase/UCM had a similar type of issue. A "Vob" is a mountpoint for a
virtual filesystem. And early releases of UCM had a notion of a
"component", where components had to be rooted at the top of the VOB
(its mountpoint). Due to increasing user demand, UCM later allowed so
called "sub-Vob" components, so long as they were rooted at a versioned
directory within the VOB.

This would mean that revisions might be repo-wide, or could be
narrowed/pared down to a subtree. Recursion would be interesting to
handle, amd som ekind of inheritance mechanism might need to be
specified as to whether or not a revision of a subtree would "percolate"
up to its its containing parent or not, and when/if the parent version
would simply map to an assembly of "sub versions" (versions of subtrees)

Then again, maybe the better way to handle it (particularly with
recursion) is the virtual repository of repositories model.

-- 
Brad Appleton <brad@bradapp.net> www.bradapp.net
    Software CM Patterns (www.scmpatterns.com)
    Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration
"And miles to go before I sleep" --Robert Frost
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