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RE: Communication of LOCKS and CHANGES

From: Bicking, David (HHoldings, IT) <David.Bicking_at_thehartford.com>
Date: 2007-11-26 17:35:37 CET

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Erik Huelsmann [mailto:ehuels@gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 3:13 PM

> >
> > Horrible, isn't it? You apparently would rather let each
> product team
> > come up with their own cache format for their own plugin,
> and woe be
> > it to the poor developer who uses two different tools at once (like
> > us, Ankh and Tortoise). As soon as I update in Tortoise, the
> > information is there, but Ankh is blissfully unaware, and
> the developr
> > very quickly learns not to trust the information.
> >
> >
> > Yeah. Clearly I'm not convincing anybody. I see the arguments
> > against this feature come down to these points (combining Les' and
> > Erik's
> > arguments):
> >
> > 1. You shouldn't work "that" way, and if you do, Subversion
> should not
> > help you stop.
>
> Wrong conclusion. The point I'm making is: if you want to
> work that way, you're using the wrong tool. Buy ClearCase.

Ah. I misunderstood.

>
> > 2. Information about major code efforts should be
> communicated by any
> > means EXCEPT Subversion.
>
> Also wrong conclusion: if you want to notify people, do so
> through all means available (use post-lock hooks to send
> mails, RSS, etc) but don't DEPEND on Subversion alone.
> Communicate with your colleagues.
> Subversion is a Version Control System, not your phone and
> interface to the people in the booth next to you (or on the
> other side of the world).

Extra coding and spam emails (immediately out of date) are okay. An
unobtrusive icon in an IDE is not. Understood.

>
> > 3. The lock information might be out of date as soon as it is
> > retrieved (but version information won't?)
>
> Right. Both lock and version information is out of date the
> minute you retrieve it. That's the basic assumption in the
> Copy-Modify-Merge model. Everything is outdated the minute
> you retrieve it, therefore you need tools to help you resolve
> differences between your local changes and the changes later
> retrieved from the server.

Thus, arguing that you won't cache lock information because it is
immediately out of date does not make sense.

>
> > 4. If a GUI client wants to offer the feature, each one
> should do it
> > in their own way.
>
> No. They should all do it the same way: give the user correct
> information (ie the CURRENT status) by querying the server
> real time, online, read ahead, whatever you want to call it.

See my just posted response to another message saying the same thing.

>
> > 5. As soon as lock communication is available, developers will stop
> > trusting Subversion and each other.
>
> I have no idea what you're trying to say here. What I say is
> that as soon as a feature isn't presenting information which
> is correct (most of the time) it's not much of a feature and
> users will ignore it.
> Nothing about trust, simple logic combined with experience.

Semantics. You said they will ignore the data. I translated that into
distrust of the data, as I can't see another reason they'd ignore it.

>
> > 6. It is perfectly normal for a developer to simply decide
> the lock-er
> > is clueless, break the lock, and continue doing their own thing.
>
> That's for you and your team to decide. It may be and it may not be...

Got it. I would not want to be on a team that ignored locks, though.

> > I totally disagree with all those reasons, but there's
> nothing I can
> > do about it. Since nobody else is jumping in to my support, I can
> > only conclude that I am the only one who finds this
> peculiar. At this
> > point, all I can do is lay out these points for posterity
> and let it
> > drop, so that is what I am doing.
>
> That's because you're expecting things which can't be done
> within the philosophy of the product. What you want is
> perfectly legal in a different set of circumstances: if the
> client were to require a realtime connection to the server
> anyway, it wouldn't be too hard to provide the user with the
> correct feedback in the first place. That's where ClearCase
> comes in: they have all working copies on the server and the
> server can tell each client everything about all other
> working copies in the system. Subversion doesn't work that way...

I still disagree that Subversion must work that way for the information
to be useful. C'est la vie. It is clearly a philosophical issue,
though, and thus one not worth fighting.

>
> > On the bright side, I now have a good reason to learn how
> to make my
> > own additions to Subversion. My expertise is Java and C#,
> but I can
> > learn gnu c. I just need to carve out the time somehow.
> Of course,
> > it'll never be merged into the project, but at least I can have the
> > satisfaction of doing it.
>
> It would be too bad if you were to do that. There are APIs to
> get the required information from the server... I can't stop
> you however from doing it. If you will ever get to a state
> where you'll be releasing it, please be very careful about
> naming it, because it might not be forward compatible with
> Subversion clients...

It's not getting the information I'm considering, it's storing the
information. The only change to getting the information I might
consider is adding an option to get both sets at once.

>
>
> Bye,
>
>
> Erik.
>

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Received on Mon Nov 26 17:36:21 2007

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