On 1/10/07, Owen Thomas <othomas@wcg.net.au> wrote:
> I have this idea:
>
> I want to include a 'Change Rationale' document for each file under
> version control. You may ask why, and my answer is simple: I want to
> know why revision-such-and-such involved updating file so-and-so with
> these-number-of changes. My solution: to have a separate file associated
> with file so-and-so that gives the developer the opportunity to
> succinctly yet comprehensively state why these-number-of changes were
> necessary in terms of revision such-and-such.
I think what Jeff, Eric, and Mark were getting at, is that you could
re-conceptualize the svn:log property data, and transform it into your
"Change Rationale" format. Think of svn:log as a text file that always
gets added with each revision. It can even be changed later, after
commit. You can format this text data any way you want, CSV, ODF, XML,
YAML, INF, CONF, etc. Or make up your own format.
Either way you implement this "Change Rationale" system, you're
going to need to wrap your "svn commit" actions with some custom
script to initiate the "rationale input step". This wrapper script
will probably open your editor of choice, and always start on some
basic template. If you get sufficiently fancy, the template or form
fields can be based on a list of files returned from "svn status", and
maybe even list changed line numbers returned for each file by a diff,
presenting the diff lines for convenience of reference (but not
including them in the file directly). Likewise, you may want to wrap
any "svn log" command to return some method of opening any svn:log or
rationale-file entry in the list in your desired editor/viewer. Once
those tools are done, it shouldn't much matter whether that rationale
data is stored in svn:log or some other file or database. svn:log is
already there, so you might as well use it.
:) Jared
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Thu Jan 11 02:47:24 2007