On 2019-04-17 13:47, Sad Clouds wrote:
On Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 11:39 AM Johnny Billquist <b...@update.uu.se> wrote:
What exactly is a "true branch"? Subversion does have branches, they
are fast and work quite well.
Not really. Subversion have copies. There are differences. One being
that it's very hard to even find out what "branches" exists in Subversion.
Somebody mentioned lack of tags, well Subversion uses branches, they
are essentially the same thing.
Same copy as above. Subversion only have copies, and tries to make
everything fit this, which isn't as good as the Subversion people try to
claim. Also, Subversion actually have a couple of tags, but they are
special cases, and you cannot create your own.
OK can you elaborate a bit more in detail? What do you think is the
difference between "true branches" and "copies"? With Subversion, when
you create a branch on a server, it doesn't make a physical copy of
every single file, it creates CopyOnWrite, so it's fast and doesn't
take up much space. So where is the problem?
Correct. However, with a branch, I can see, by looking at the file, in
the one place it is, what different branches that file exists in.
With subversion I have no clue. Yes, copies are cheap, and that is a
really nice property.
Also I don't understand your comment - 'it's very hard to even find
out what "branches" exists in Subversion.' This is not true, it's up
to you how to organize your branches, but most people have a subfolder
called "branches" and you can easily list all branches there.
That's the point. By convention you try to solve the problem. The issue
is that this only works as far as that convention is followed, and you
have filename space to search instead of looking at the file to find
what branches and tags you have for it.
Your argument follows exactly the same lines as the official Subversion
position on this. All I am saying is that I do not agree with this. I
don't consider searching through a file system to be a good way to find
branches, not to mention that there is no guarantee that a "branch" is
just kept in some specific directory. People make mistakes, are
sometimes very creative, and god knows what else. I also like being able
to check out a different branch for just some files, while keeping other
parts on a different branch, and still have that in the same places in
the file system, so that I can do builds with this, and quickly switch a
file between different versions or branches without doing additional
copies of files back and forth to have them in the "appropriate" place
in the file system for the work that I am doing.
A branched file can be checked out from different branches, and it stays
in the same place in the file system. A copy do not.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
