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Re: Checking out individual files

From: Les Mikesell <lesmikesell_at_gmail.com>
Date: 2007-01-28 22:01:12 CET

Ryan Schmidt wrote:

>>> i.e. The difficulty some new SVN users seem to have is in stubbornly
>>> insisting on misusing the tool because one can't quite accept that it
>>> offers a slightly different solution (screws) to the same problem
>>> (affixing things). And this it does with aplomb, but it does require
>>> stepping back and not "What am I trying to accomplish?" without
>>> presupposing a solution.
>>
>> You lost me on this one. Are you suggesting that he shouldn't use svn
>> for this task, or that there is some yet unmentioned way to do what he
>> wants with svn.
>
> The user wants to check out individual files. Subversion does not offer
> that. Rather than saying the tool is broken, the user should ask "WHY am
> I trying to check out individual files?

I'd assume that the user knows his job, and instead ask why a tool that
doesn't provide the facility he wants is being forced on him.

> What am I really trying to
> accomplish?" Maybe there is a way to use Subversion to accomplish the
> real task, while not requiring that it be possible to check out single
> files.

Well, yes - you can check out the entire contents of a directory and
ignore everything else, a solution that wastes the user's time,
bandwidth and disk space - and just looks silly...

> Subversion has been around for awhile now and has been used in
> different situations. While it's certainly possible that the user has a
> use case that nobody has thought of before, perhaps instead it's a use
> case that others are successfully using Subversion for. We just need to
> know what the use case is.

This isn't the first time this issue has been mentioned. The subversion
web page still claims that subversion has most of CVS's features but
misses on something as simple as this - and for no particular technical
reason that I can see.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell@gmail.com
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Received on Sun Jan 28 22:03:10 2007

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