Thanks Stefan, excellent answer.
> It was basically assumed that users would easily grok the UI
> because a "copy" is a simple concept that's also known to
> people who haven't used version control before.
> However, when you also do advanced stuff like merging you
> need to understand how to use the copy operation appropriately.
Yes... I see that some of the UIs are trying to disambiguate branches
from copies, by instance restricting choices for the source of a merge
to those copies that are antecedents or have mergeinfo or something (the
collabnet eclipse plugin). This seems like a good direction. (Something
for Tortoise maybe?)
> Users need to be aware of branches and use merge to transfer
> changes between them. So the new files should be merged from
> the other branch, not copied.
> And ideally all merges such happen at branch roots (just like
> in any other version control system).
Yes... Our "SubCop" refuses to allow merges that didn't happen at the
branch root.
> But doing copy operations within a branch root (i.e. they
> don't cross branch boundaries) is fine.
Is a copy, as opposed to a rename/move really fine? I'm not sure why
people would want two files in the same branch to share a common
history. In this case, what I believe happens is that people svn copy an
existing class (or whatever) as the basis of a new class, when a
filesystem copy and Add might be more appropriate. Anyway, I think this
process is indicative of other problems in the development lifecycle.
> the version control needs of the next decade would be (recall
> that the designers of Subversion were coming from CVS). Today
> we know what most people need. And because Subversion was
> made flexible it's entirely possible to use Subversion in a
> way that's very pleasent *if* you know what not to do.
> You've run into one of these cases...
Yes. It makes sense. I read that "subversion always assumes the user
knows what they're doing". Unfortunately that doesn't hold true in the
real world (at least the corporate world).
Cheers, jamie
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Received on 2011-01-25 12:37:13 CET