<rant>
I'm really getting tired of people saying this whenever questions about
the revision numbers come up. Even if you agree that a revision number
isn't a meaningful piece of information (which I don't!) it's the most
visible piece of information that comes up when working with Subversion.
You see it everywhere, when you committ, when you view logs, etc, etc.
For some, who are using WebDAV and autoversioning, it's about the only
useful piece of information since there are no meaningful log messages
in that situation. For others, like clients or non-programmer developers
who have only the vaguest notion of version control in the first place,
it's hard to understand that such a prominent piece of information is
"not important".
If the Subversion (and TSVN) devs agree that it's not an important piece
of information then I think it should not be displayed everywhere so
flagrantly or maybe have verbose options which display it. I personally
think it's a useful piece of information and I like that it's
prominently displayed and I educate my clients on what we use it for and
how they can use it also.
In short, telling people that it's "not important", even for clients, is
a useless piece of advice and in my opinion also wrong.
</rant>
All that said, if I'm understanding the original poster correctly, he is
using the repository revision number as part or all of the version
number for the project. How does he ever expect that isn't going to be
confusing to the client unless the client is a development shop or they
understand repository-wide revisions. If the client is unable to
understand revision numbers as version numbers then for pity sake go the
extra mile and give them a version number that makes them happy and you
can translate back to a specific revision. THAT is not rocket science.
I have had clients that were confused by revision numbers but always,
once they were able to access the log and do some basic drill down
themselves (all hail the mighty triumverate Subversion + TortoiseSVN +
Trac), revision numbers became a non-issue.
Flame on!
Rick
-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Palmer [mailto:scott.palmer@2connected.org]
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2005 3:34 PM
To: Subversion mailing list
Subject: Re: per-project version numbers - a way to support them?
(without changing Subversion!?)
On 15-Sep-05, at 3:10 PM, Alan Jay Weiner wrote:
> Like others coming from other revision systems, I'm bothered by
> repository-wide
> version numbers. (I've accepted it, but it keeps coming up with
> clients - "why
> is this version X+N instead of X+1?")
> Just saying "get used to it" isn't an answer to those who don't
> *want* it to
> work that way.
Besides really having the urge to say "get used to it", I have to wonder
why you think revision numbers in your subversion repository matter in
the slightest? Why are your clients looking at the revision numbers at
all?
It's not like the numbers have any significant meaning. If the number
is 12 for one "version" on your project and "1345" for the next, what
does that really mean? The revision number getting bumped doesn't
correspond to any logical unit of change in the project, even if you do
have one revision number per project. E.g. it goes up even when you
revert a change and move backwards.
You can already get the version number of the last change to a folder/
file:
$ svn info
Path: .
URL: svn://myserver/myproject/trunk
Repository UUID: bb17bfd5-26e3-0310-b67b-ca9ce5c526f2
Revision: 2788
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: scott.palmer
Last Changed Rev: 2775
Last Changed Date: 2005-09-12 21:13:12 -0400 (Mon, 12 Sep 2005)
Properties Last Updated: 2005-04-29 16:51:32 -0400 (Fri, 29 Apr 2005)
Will "Last Changed Rev:" or perhaps some fancy script involving finding
the greatest " Last Changed Rev" in a tree get you want you want?
Is there a reason you can't use the one project per repository model?
> Ideas, anyone?
If you could explain the rational for needing subversion to track per-
project version numbers in the first place it might help generate some
ideas. I.e. why exactly is it that you don't want it to work the way it
does now? What problem are you trying to solve?
My first inclination would be to simply stop giving the revision
information to your clients... then they won't have anything to ask
questions about :).
Scott
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Fri Sep 16 15:55:30 2005