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Re: looking for one word to encompass trunk, tag and branch

From: B. Smith-Mannschott <bsmith.occs_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:13:56 +0200

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 16:51, Les Mikesell<lesmikesell_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> They are all revisions...  Tags are the only things that are different, and
> only by the convention that you don't commit after creating them so they
> only have the HEAD revision - and that isn't enforced.

No, in the vocabulary of Subversion a "revision" is one of the
numbered transactions that make up the global history of a repository.
I have no desire to overload that term with an unrelated meaning.

A branch is not a revision. Nor a tag. Nor a trunk. A branch may have
*been created* as part of a particular revision, when it was copied
form some-path last modified as part of some-other-revision. The
branch may even be said to have *been modified* as part of
this-revision and that-revision; last modified in another-revision.

>> I like variant.
>
> Why is that better than 'revision' or 'version'?  Using only one term makes
> it easier to see that there are multiple dimensions to the way you access
> them and one is as valid as another.  That is, you get a revision whether or
> not you specify a revision number, and tags are just a way to  tie a
> revision to the head of URL path.

In our case "Version" and "revision" are both too overloaded for this
task. Version, in our usage, generally indicates a SCM version, like
1.2.3 or 5.0.0-SNAPSHOT. We use Revision exclusively to describe
ordered commits to an Subversion repository.

Also, if we decided to call this a "revision" (url):

svn://example.com/svn/repo/project/branches/new-hotness

Then, what might we call this:

svn://example.com/svn/repo/project/branches/new-hotness_at_r1111

A revision revision? The "revision" new-hotness at revision 1111?

As an aside, your mention of "HEAD" reminded me of something. In the
Mercurial world the term that I'm groping for would be "head". In
mercurial a head is a commit with no children, so it's the most recent
commit on some branch/tag/trunk. The mercurial people use the word
"tip" to describe the most recent head. (Roughly equivalent to
Subversion's use of HEAD).

// Ben

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Received on 2009-08-18 17:15:55 CEST

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