On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 6:26 PM, <kmradke_at_rockwellcollins.com> wrote:
>
> "David Weintraub" <qazwart_at_gmail.com> wrote on 11/17/2008 03:06:25 PM:
> ...
>> In most revision control software a label "APPROVED_QA" would not tell
>> you what was the previous revision that was approved for QA or what
>> the difference is between this QA revision and the last, or when this
>> revision was approved for QA. By using Subversion and getting rid of
>> floating labels, you no longer have this problem.
>
> One of the "nice" things about floating labels is that I know
> "APPROVED_QA" is always the latest one, I don't need to manually
> search "tags/QA/..." for the "last" one...
>
> (And yes, you could have an "APPROVED_QA" tag that is deleted and
> recreated every time a -xxx one is created, but that is a pain.)
>
> This concept is really no different than "HEAD" is today, just
> with greater flexibility.
If you really want a floating tag, why not just treat APPROVED_QA as a
branch instead of a tag. Merge your changes onto the APPROVED_QA "tag"
and commit them. We do something similar with our webpage deployments.
We have our development on trunk, then when we are ready to deploy,
copy it to our QA server branch, and then to our PROD branch.
Or, just do the delete/copy tag operation anyway. You can delete and
add a tag in Subversion faster than you can retag your files in any
other revision control system on the market.
The problem with the floating tag is what happens if you have to move
back in time. What was your previous QA release? What if you discover
a new bug in your QA release and you want to know what changed between
one QA release and another. You can't with a floating tag because you
lost your history.
The main reason we used a floating tag was the difficulty in just
finding out what is the latest release. In almost all revision control
systems, you either have to find that special file that existed in
each and every release and was labeled in each and every release, or
get a listing of all the tags on all the files, and combine them into
a single super list. The first took special knowledge of your project,
and the second could take quite a while to perform.
In Subversion, finding the last label created is easy. Our development
and QA people know where to find that information. We simply don't
need to mark the last build or the last QA release with a special
floating tag anymore.
--
David Weintraub
qazwart_at_gmail.com
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Received on 2008-11-18 06:23:49 CET