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Re: help me show others that there are valid reasons for not supporting a $log$ keyword!

From: Andy Levy <andy.levy_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 09:52:26 -0400

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 09:32, Steve Povilaitis <stevepov_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Most exalted ones,
>
> Our program management is clamoring for including a revision history like
> the old cvs $log$ keyword at the beginning of every file. I know there are
> good reasons for not supporting a $log$ keyword or even the idea of
> including a running log in the file, but if I'm not able to make a case for
> abandoning the idea, I'm going to be forced into writing some sort of kludgy
> script to do just that. I've searched previous posts explaining why this is
> a bad idea and this is my understanding of some of the key points:
>
> 1. It's dumb to include version history in the file since this is meta-data
> that is implicitly part of the versioning system, and there are better ways
> of using subversion to get this data in much more understandable/useful
> formats.
> 2. Having a large block of text at the front of the file is unwieldy and
> confuses external diff tools.
> 3. It messes up binary files
> 4. Possible merge conflicts
>
> What else folks?

You've nailed the best ones so far. If you haven't already, also have
a look at http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#log-in-source

Another argument for you (and kind of addressed in the FAQ): in
Subversion, logs are NOT file-centric. They are based upon the
revision. It is not possible to pull the log messages for a single
file. You can pull the log messages for all revisions in which the
file in question was edited, but you can't differentiate which
portions of the log message apply to which file (unless you have a
strict structure to those log messages).

> Also, for every tagged release we do for the customer they're going to want
> an export of the source with the revision log for each file appended to the
> beginning of the file. Have any of you had to do something along those lines
> and would you mind sharing how you accomplished it?

That makes no sense at all. You should be publishing a single
changelist saying "here's what changed since your last release."

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Received on 2008-09-16 15:53:08 CEST

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