Repository side linking ("Share" feature)

[Adrian Wilkins <ad...@gmail.com>]

Introduction : 
I'm a Win32 / VB developer with a 5 year experience of Visual
SourceSafe. My experience with *nix is limited. I like the looks of
Subversion, particularly in light of some particularly horrible
experiences with SourceSafe losing history.

One feature that I'm missing though, is the feature that SS calls
"Share" (and implicitly, it's compadré "Pin").

I was wondering if anyone had any comments on the RFC produced by one
Woody Hackswell this February and posted to this list? I have some
revisions to his implementation that I believe would simplify matters,
but no discussion on his RFC appears to have taken place.

I think implementing a "Share" (and "Pin") feature in SVN would be
advantageous..

i) Need not bother anyone not wanting to use it

Important not to upset the present userbase

ii) Would provide a feature that many veteran SourceSafe users have
grown used to.

This reduces the impedance involved in getting people to change over
;- the fewer working practices that have to change, the easier it is
for you to get on board.

svn copy does not keep the copy at the HEAD revision
svn:externals only works on whole folders, and requires manual
intervention when switching root folders.

After reading Woodys RFC and thinking about it for a few hours, I feel
that this feature is achievable with a new type of repository
filesystem node, as he states. I do have a few revisions to his
design, most notably that I don't distiguish between "root share" and
"secondary share", which I believe simplifies matters somewhat.

Would the dev community be interested / hostile / mocking about such a
feature? Adding it would, in my opinion, tick the "Does everything
SourceSafe does (apart from wreck your repository)" box and provide a
more attractive option to MS developers, which means more users for
Subversion. More users in an OSS project is good, no? Esp. when they
are developers?

*braces for impact*  ;-)

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Re: Repository side linking ("Share" feature)

[Ben Collins-Sussman <su...@collab.net>]

On Dec 6, 2004, at 12:00 PM, Branko Čibej wrote:
>
> That said, in-repository symbolic links (a replacement for 
> svn:externals) would certainly be welcome; *but* I don't think they 
> can happen before 2.0.

Yeah.  I can't possibly imagine how to add a new 'link' type within the 
repository without a major schema change.  That means svn 2.0.


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Re: Repository side linking ("Share" feature)

[Branko Čibej <br...@xbc.nu>]

Adrian Wilkins wrote:

>Introduction : 
>I'm a Win32 / VB developer with a 5 year experience of Visual
>SourceSafe. My experience with *nix is limited. I like the looks of
>Subversion, particularly in light of some particularly horrible
>experiences with SourceSafe losing history.
>
>One feature that I'm missing though, is the feature that SS calls
>"Share" (and implicitly, it's compadré "Pin").
>  
>
What really bugs me about VSS's "share" feature is that it works on 
individual files, but not on directories. In my simple-minded, plodding 
way, I expected exactly the opposite -- after all, you'd usually want to 
share _components_ -- which I tend to translate to "several files in 
their own directory (tree)" -- not individual files. But I freely admit 
to being too stupid to understand the design decisions that produced VSS.

That said, in-repository symbolic links (a replacement for 
svn:externals) would certainly be welcome; *but* I don't think they can 
happen before 2.0. In order to work correctly, an libsvn_wc rewrite is 
also necessary (e.g., the WC must "know" when two files refer to the 
same repoitory object). But then, almost everything depends on a 
libsvn_wc rewrite... :-(


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