On 11/30/2010 12:04 PM, Ludwig, Michael wrote:
But the name has nothing to do with the versioning of the
object.
True, but many humans tend to attach meaning to names, to remember
them, and to refer to them. For example, names often appear in the
contents of other files. They just have a tendency of cropping up
here and there. People might find it useful if Subversion had
better support for this.
But when humans use names they have to understand their non-unique
nature or face surprises. If there was a Les Mikesell before 1949, it
wasn't me. If there are others now, they aren't me either. Subversion
represents a matrix of paths and time; different names come and go over
time and very often many different names refer to the same thing and the
same name may to different things at different times.
Where does the client/server protocol have such functionality
now? I think it is only in showing a log -v of the directory
containing the name.
It doesn't have this functionality right now. You'd have to parse
the output of "log -v", yes. It's onerous on both the server and
the human.
Saying you don't like to parse the answer isn't the same as saying it
doesn't have the functionality.
That already exists. A 'log -v' from the top of the repo will
show all deletes and adds ever done. The output isn't
convenient to feed to grep, etc., though.
It would work, somehow. I'm aware of that. I'm just imagining a
more convenient feature that also performs better. A lookup
instead of a scan.
There are lots of other places I would consider more important than
making it easy to find something you deleted on purpose. A handy way to
track where something went when you later copied to a tag might be
something people would be more likely to want to know frequently - but
again, the answer might be large and hard to parse because there's no
particular limit to the number of copies that could have been made. And
if you did have the name lookup you want, you still have to deal with
the issue that in every rev where the name is found it may be some
different object.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikes...@gmail.com
