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Re: Subversion Doesn't Have Branches aka Crossing the Streams aka Branches as First Class Objects?

From: Zé <jose.passes_at_gmx.com>
Date: Sun, 19 May 2013 09:20:31 +0100

On 05/18/2013 08:33 PM, David Chapman wrote:
> On 5/18/2013 12:01 PM, Zé wrote:
>> On 05/18/2013 07:16 PM, David Chapman wrote:
>>>
>>> You are pretty insistent that there is One True Way to use branches in
>>> development.
>>
>> No, I'm stating that if all a SCM does is track changes made to the
>> contents of a directory and you rely on changes made to that directory
>> to emulate branches, then there are some significant downsides to this
>> approach when compared with SCM systems which do offer support for
>> branching.
>
> You've missed the point. You have a specific definition of branching
> and do not believe that anything else can be called branching.

You are confused. This discussion is about how subversion lacks any
support for branching, which is quite obvious to anyone who understands
and acknowledges that all subversion does is track revision changes to a
file system. What you are insistingly referring to as branches is
nothing more than a copy of a particular subdirectory (i.e., the trunk)
into another subdirectory (i.e., branches), which is nothing more than a
plain recursive directory copy operation on a file system. The
operation doesn't change its name or nature (tag, trunk, simple
server-side directory copy) depending on the directories which are
copied around the repository. Is that so hard for you to understand?

> In your
> message to Thorsten Schöning, you said that branch history should be
> deleted if the branch is deleted. That is fundamentally in opposition
> to the definition of Subversion, which is meant to retain all of a
> project's history.

Again, that's wrong. The only thing that leads subversion to track how
a subdirectory is copied around in the repository is the fact that this
is not a branching operation: this is nothing more than a plain file
system operation.

The point of this whole discussion is that subversion does not support
branching, and therefore subversion users have to rely on the "let's
copy the trunk directory somewhere in the repo to simulate
tags/branches" hack to make do. Instead of relying on this hack,
subversion would be significantly improved if it actually supported
branches. How come you've replied so many times to this discussion if
you are so oblivious to what has been discussed so far?

<snip other misconceptions/>

-- 
Zé
Received on 2013-05-19 10:21:15 CEST

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