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

B. Smith-Mannschott wrote:
> 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.

But they are all numbered transactions. There is no way to get anything
else out of the repository. Perhaps the fact that the latest (head)
transaction is conveniently used as the default if you don't supply one
is confusing you. But find it's number and ask with/without and you'll
see that you get the same thing.

> A branch is not a revision. Nor a tag. Nor a trunk.

The only thing you can reference with them is a revision. They exist
only to hold revisions.

> 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.

Try to describe how you get something other than a revision out. Or how
committing creates something other than a revision. If you can, I've
been missing something. (I suppose there are the non-versioned
properties, but that's pretty esoteric.)

> 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.

There's an elegant simplicity here. It's revisions all the way down.

> 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?

Note that if your repository is at revision 1111 or there is nothing
newer on that path, both of those refer to exactly the same thing.

> 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).

I think that's the elusive concept here. If you don't specify a
revision explicitly you still get a revision that happens to be the
HEAD. That doesn't mean it deserves another name. It's just a revision
that, after the next commit, will require an explicit number to reproduce.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell_at_gmail.com
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