To quote http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Subversion/User_Guide :
Let me emphasize one point: using subversion means that you will
NEVER lose any committed files or changes to those files.
... unless someone decides to rename a directory in the tree,
as just happend for example with the switch from addons/excel/tara
to addons/tables/tara.
Dear tree maintainers (Chris,Oleg,Alex): Please don't do this lightly.
While the SVN people brag about being able to rename files/dirs, this
it not really true. An "svn move" is a mere copy followed by a delete.
(Ref: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.ref.svn.c.move.html )
If you do such a thing, locally modified files do _not_ migrate along
with the rest to the new name. SVN checks out the official repository
version to the new name, and the user has to reconciliate all local
changes manually. This can be a tedious affair.
What's worse: it is very easy to miss this happen at all and to build
the next version missing the local changes. If it weren't for the Wiki's
RSS feed listing a related "fix links" change by Chris, I wouldn't have
noticed what (not) happened.
My "svn update" today resulted in roughly 50 lines of output quickly
scrolling by. SVN did not particularly warn about uncommitted changes
in a "D"eleted file, it just let the concerned file silently linger around.
It takes some revision control experience to do the right thing
in this situation. For example, you cannot even do a naive "svn diff"
at this moment to see what your local change were.
I happen to have enough SVN background knowledge to resolve this quite
quickly (10 minutes), but others might not be so lucky. Furthermore,
the additional work accumulates along with every locally modified file.
So my plea:
- Please avoid renamings/relocations in the SVN tree if possible.
- If you absolutely cannot resist a name change, please
post an announcement to the "programming" mailing list
giving an explicit Heads up! to all SVN users.
I know that it's difficult to predict a taxonomy suited for future
developments, but IMHO mere aesthetics alone do not justify a renaming
with the impact as described above. In the specific case of "table/tara"
vs. "excel/tara" I'm even unable to see any advantage of the new
nomenclature. Am I missing something?
Martin
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