Re: reposurgeon now writes Subversion repositories

[Daniel Shahaf <danielsh@elego.de>]

(note, other half of the thread is on dev@svn only..)

Eric S. Raymond wrote on Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 06:46:37 -0500:
> Daniel Shahaf <danielsh@elego.de>:
> > You might also seek community consensus to reserve an svn:foo name for
> > the "original author" property --- perhaps svn:original-author --- so
> > that reposurgeon and other git->svn tools can interoperate in the way
> > they transfer the "original author" information.
> 
> OK.  But I like the idea of letting the users set their own author
> content string better.  Instead of another layer of kluges, why

I don't see the kludge here --- git has a "author" != "committer"
distinction, svn doesn't, so if you want to grow that distinction the
most natural way is a new property.  Storing additional information in
svn:author is a separate issue.

> > >   Subversion has a concept of "flows"; that is, named segments of
> > >   history corresponding to files or directories that are created when
> > >   the path is added, cloned when the path is copied, and deleted when
> > >   the path is deleted. This information is not preserved in import
> > >   streams or the internal representation that reposurgeon uses.  Thus,
> > >   after editing, the flow boundaries of a Subversion history may be
> > >   arbitrarily changed.
> > > 
> > > This is me being obsessive about documenting the details.  I think it
> > > is doubtful that most Subversion users even know flows exist.
> > 
> > I think you're saying that adds might turn into copies, and vice-versa.
> > That is something users would notice --- it is certainly exposed in the
> > UI --- even though node-id's are not exposed to clients.
> 
> I'm saying nobody thinks of flows when they do branch copies.  It's
> not just that users don't see node IDs, it's that no part of most users'
> mental model of how Subversion works resembles them.

I'm still not sure what you have in mind.  I note that 'svn log' and
'svn blame' cross both file copies and branch creation --- that's one
effect of "'svn cp foo bar; svn ci' causes bar to be related to foo".

> -- 
> 		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>