On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 12:54:15PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 08:37:17AM -0700, Lan Barnes wrote:
keyword expansion is just plain evil. Anything that mungs source is evil.
Really? I've derived a lot of happiness from it. It Just Works for me.
Really. They are probably the single most obnoxious attribute of our use
of P4 at work, especially given P4's blurring of branch and directory
names. Just branching a file causes the version stamp to change, making
merges or even just diffs obnoxious.
I'm beginning to feel that _any_ process that involves putting history data
somewhere in the source tree is just an indicator of a missing feature from
a revision control system. Keyword expansion just indicates that the
system either doesn't keep track of file versions very well, or isn't
distributed. If the revision control system is distributed, and everyone
who has the source, has the revision information, then they aren't needed.
Another is a "ChangeLog" file. The need to write history information into
a file suggests that the history in the revision control system either
isn't very good, or isn't accessible.
The problem is that the ChangeLog information is detached from the actual
changes. If I've got a distributed copy of the history, along with the
change descriptions, I can see the real diffs, and look at the real old
versions.
Even finding commented-out code suggests that the programmer thought it
would be too hard to find or retrieve that code later from the revision
control system.
BTW, something like "NEWS" which summarizes a bunch of changes in a release
is still useful.
David
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