On 09/22/2014 11:04 AM, Julian Foad wrote: > Would you accept that it now makes more sense to make the overall > system behaviour more consistent by moving towards the majority > direction (not preserving no-ops)? At least at some layers -- repos > layer or RA layer?
"At least at some layers", yes, absolutely. In general, I favor consistency, but the scope of that consistency matters, especially in a modular system such as Subversion. For example, I've always appreciated the idea that the Subversion FS layer was designed with academic DAG-based version control theory in mind (not mine, of course!), and as such will allow some things to happen that perhaps we prefer to block from happening at levels of Subversion which are closer to the end user. Some have argued that this should not be -- that the FS layer should enforce exactly what the client layer does. I disagree. More to the topic, I continue to see value in preserving no-op operations in the FS layer. But at the client end of things, I would agree that the most users don't care to be bothered by such nuances. So as it does for others of those behaviors that differ at extreme ends of the Subversion system, some mitigation needs to take place somewhere in the middle. And that "somewhere" depends on what you want to permit. For example, if that mitigation happens at the repos layer, that's fine for the most part ... but what about the likes of 'svnrdump', which is trying its darnedest to act like a repos-layer dump/load driver but sits on the other end of the higher RA layer? -- C. Michael Pilato <cmpil...@collab.net> CollabNet <> www.collab.net <> Enterprise Cloud Development
