On Thu, Feb 05, 2009 at 03:17:12PM -0500, Mark Phippard wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Jens-Heiner Rechtien
> <Jens-Heiner.Rechtien_at_sun.com> wrote:
>
> >> I'd have advised you not to do that, but I am inclined to think it
> >> will be OK. You are probably going to need to cleanup the branches
> >> though, else the old mergeinfo is going to make its way back to trunk.
> >
> > Yes, currently we remove the all the mergeinfo on trunk which comes in
> > due to reintegration. This way we hope to keep trunk clean.
>
> That is a little bit more worrisome. It could turn out to be fine
> because you use a structured release engineering process and the
> branching model you are using does not currently require this
> information, but it does not feel right. At a minimum, you will lose
> the log/blame -g feature as it needs to see the svn:mergeinfo
> committed with the merge to know what was merged from where.
>
> I thought you did a one-time "after the fact" cleanup. This would not
> have broken log/blame because the cleanup would have happened in a
> different revision than the commit.
Removing mergeinfo is starting to become a habit to hack around
limitations of the tool, like repo-copies were for CVS.
We do it in our own repo all the time. I did it recently for a file
I removed by accident and then resurrected by copying it back from
history on the same branch. The rationale behind removing the mergeinfo
in that case was that Subversion cannot tell whether a copy is a merge
(copy between branches) or not (copy within one branch), and we don't
need intra-branch information in merge history.
In this thread, people have said they remove mergeinfo without
giving reasons why, or giving reasons that do not make much sense
to me (and if they don't make sense to me, I don't think they make
sense to the majority of users out there).
If this habit is due to a limitation in Subversion, we had better
document it. We need decent documentation about this in some prominent
place which explains what is safe to do and what is not. If people are
really going to do this (we can't really stop them), than they had
better know what mergeinfo is safe to remove and what isn't.
I'd like to read such a document anyway, I definitely need some
education about this.
Stefan
Received on 2009-02-05 21:37:21 CET