RE: Create task (logical group of files)?

By the way Henry,

I can completely understand and relate to how and why being about to
logically group files by something like "task" could be desirable. Although
everything others have said about how and why you can get the same
functional result by simply checking out the full directory is true, I can
see scenarios where it's not a case of can you physically do the same thing
in SVN? But rather, as a developer, there could be great advantage in being
able to relate a set of files with a task. It's an issue of facilitating
the developer's "memory". As a developer, I may know of a "task" that I
need to work on, but may not remember exactly which files need to be updated
for that task. If there's a mechanism to map files to tasks when the task
is defined, then as a developer, I can check the "task" out and so "Oh, ya,
that's right, I'm potentially going to make changes in these 5 or 6 files".
Instead of checking an entire directory out and then staring at possibly 100
or more files saying "now. which of these files do I care about again?"

  _____

From: Tom Malia [mailto:tommalia@ttdsinc.com]
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 8:04 AM
To: 'Henry LS'; 'Troy Curtis Jr'
Cc: users@subversion.tigris.org
Subject: RE: Create task (logical group of files)?

Henry,

I believe one feature that is due in an upcoming release of SVN that might
be helpful here is "sparse directories" (or at least I think that's the name
of it). My understanding is that this feature will let you check out less
than the full set of files from a directory. Once this feature is present,
perhaps it will be possible to create checkout scripts that can come close
to duplicating the functionality you're looking for,

  _____

From: Henry LS [mailto:henrylsun@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2007 11:46 PM
To: Troy Curtis Jr
Cc: users@subversion.tigris.org
Subject: Re: Create task (logical group of files)?

Hi Troy,

Thank you for your prompt answer. Just the information I was looking for.
Our current version control system (commercial software) allow us to create
tasks, then associate a number of files with the task. Developers can then
check out a task. It will check out all files grouped under that task. I
like this feature. I was just trying to find a equivalent in Subversion.
Subversion might want to add such a feature...

Cheers,
Henry

On 3/26/07, Troy Curtis Jr <troycurtisjr@gmail.com> wrote:

On 3/25/07, Henry LS <henrylsun@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am new to subversion. Had some experience with VSS. My first question is
I
> tried to just check out few files but seems svn doesn't allow this... It
> only allow me to check out folder. We have groups of files always need to
be
> changed together. They all exist in one folder. I was just wondering if I
> can create something like "task" to logically group a number of files
> together (instead of creating sub-folders)? Then check in, check out,
> change and undo change based on those logical groups... The concept
> ChangeSet looks similar to what I am looking for, but there is not much
> explanation on how Changeset works... Can anybody shed some light on it?
> Thank you.
>
> HS

Subversion versions directory trees so the smallest unit that can be
checked out and in is a directory. One reason is that it needs a
directory to put it's administrative folder (.svn) which is used to
track all of the Subversion specific meta-data and information for the
directory and the files/directories it contains.

Every commit to the Subversion repository results in the increase of
the repository revision number. This commit could contain one, or
multiple files. In either case it represents a single commit, or
"Change Set". If you want changes to a set of files to be grouped
together in a "Change Set", simply make sure that a 'svn ci' operation
includes them all.

I think that I may see were you were trying to go with that last
paragraph. You want a logical change set "item" in the repository
that you can check into and out of. That isn't what a change set in
Subversion means. You cannot go back and modify some arbitrary change
set (aka revision), you simply commit new revisions (each revision is
a change set). So you will have to use subdirectories to accomplish
what you want.

Troy

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