tagging and keeping the tree structure: an existential question

Dear Subversion folks,

I am noticing an unexpected behavior in the way the Eclipse plugins
support Subversion and in particular the usage of tags.
While one might argue that this would then be more suitable for an
eclipse plugin mailing list, the underlying question is, maybe, to which
extent and how SVN is supposed to support a specific feature of CVS.

The feature I am talking about is the fact that once you check-out a
file with CVS using a specific tag you retrieve
a) the file with the correct tagged version
b) the file in the correct location in the CVS repository tree.

It seems to me that the Eclipse plugins do not account for this function
(which is supported by the corresponding CVS plugins)
Maybe my assumptions on the usage of SVN are wrong and I wanted to know
if the general SVN users community has comments to make.

Here the problem description:

we use the word "module" to identify a well defined directory structure
like:

M/src
M/include
M/object/
M/lib

Suppose that M1 and M2 are two modules in the tree-like SVN repository,
which could look like:

trunk/alpha/beta/M1 assigned to person P1
trunk/alpha/beta/M2 assigned to person P2
(any depth is allowed, depending on the circumstances)

Assume we're using Eclipse with the Subversive plugin (I believe the
other behaves just the same, though I am not sure)

Suppose P1 wants to tag M1 with the name "MyTag" (or any other symbolic
name, for that matter).
M1 is normally handled as a single "project" in Eclipse.

Subversive only allows the following tag to be created:

tags/MyTag/M1 whereas what would be desired is:
tags/MyTag/alpha/beta/M1

In other words in our community it is fairly important that when a
symbolic name is communicated, the user of such release can extract the
code from the repository and find it in the customary location, i.e.
according to the tree structure which is present in the trunk.

Now, I know very well that to SVN trunk and tags mean nothing special,
but is this still not the case that a CVS feature is, at the very least,
cumbersome to achieve?

Notice that such a behavior can be obtained with the command line,
although in an error-prone way, by doing something like:
svn mkdir -m "creating tag MyTag" svn://URL/tags/Mytag
svn mkdir -m "creating tag MyTag" svn://URL/tags/MyTag/alpha
svn mkdir -m "creating tag MyTag" svn://URL/tags/MyTag/alpha/beta
and finally
svn copy -m "tagging MyTag" M1 svn://URL/tags/MyTag/alpha/beta

Are we the only one who have this problem?
Does SVN suggest another way to proceed?

Is requesting this functionality from the plugins the right way to proceed?

thanks for any help

Michele

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Received on 2008-08-07 18:47:41 CEST