On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 1:33 AM, Daniel Shahaf <danie...@elego.de> wrote: > Johan Corveleyn wrote on Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 22:24:19 +0200: >> On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Mark Phippard <markp...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 8:11 AM, Julian Foad <julian.f...@wandisco.com> >> [...] >> >> IDENTIFYING BRANCH ROOTS >> >> >> >> [[[ >> >> $ svn mergeinfo ^/subversion/trunk ^/subversion/branches/1.6.x >> >> Branch marker: 'subversion-source-tree' (found on both source and target) >> >> [...] >> >> >> >> $ svn mergeinfo ^/subversion/trunk ^/subversion/branches >> >> svn: E195016: Source branch marker is 'subversion-source-tree' but >> >> target has no branch marker >> >> >> >> $ svn mergeinfo ^/subversion/trunk ^/subversion/trunk >> >> svn: E195016: Source and target are the same branch >> >> ]]] >> >> >> >> This looks for a branch root marker property on the specified >> >> directory. The property name would be 'svn:branch-root' and the value >> >> would be a string that (more or less uniquely) identifies the >> >> 'project' (for want of a better word) of which this is a branch. >> >> Currently, just for testing, the property it looks for is the first >> >> ten characters of 'svn:ignore', which tends to work moderately well >> >> for ad-hoc testing against our own source tree because it exists and >> >> starts with 'ChangeLog*' in the root of every branch and (I guess) >> >> nowhere else. >> > >> > >> > This feature concerns me the most. I assume we are not proposing to add >> > this marker just for this one subcommand? I would like to see the big >> > picture of what we would do this marker so we can discuss its format and >> > its >> > ramifications. >> >> I agree with this. A branch-roots feature can be very useful in a lot >> of contexts, and I'd like it to be carefully designed to address some >> shortcomings in branching/merging (and potentially tagging as well). >> >> For instance, it'd be nice if you could refer to the "current branch >> root" at the command line, or in externals definitions (externals >> relative to the branch root), or even in viewspec files >> (svn-viewspec.py). Or if you could say: >> >> svn merge --reintegrate branch:showing-merge-info >> >> which would look for the branch-root called 'showing-merge-info', part >> of the same 'branch-marker-space'. Or something like that (just >> throwing ideas in the air). >> >> Or: >> >> svn diff tag:MyApp:rel-1.0 tag:MyApp:rel-1.1 >> >> (where 'MyApp' is the 'branch-marker', and rel-* are the tags in that >> 'namespace'). > > Quick observation: you're asking the question "Where does the branch > named %s live" (and I consider tags a special case of branches for the > purposes of avoiding having to invent terminology at 2am), Julian is > asking the question "What branch is URL %s member of?". These two > questions don't seem directly related, my first hunch was that they're > quite opposite.
Hm, indeed it's not the same question.Except if you structure your branches in such a way that it is (which is the case in our environment): all branches of branch-marker "MyApp" are put in ^/branches/MyApp (same for tags). So we effectively use the branches' parent dir as the "branch-marker" ... or something like that :-). Maybe "branch-context" is a better name than "branch-marker"? Thinking further about it, I think it makes some sense to establish a link between the branch-context, and the place where the branches live. For one thing, it helps to make sure that there are no name collisions between branches within the same branch-context. And people using SVN are quite used to the fact that branches/tags are part of the directory structure. OTOH, maybe people want to get rid of the fact that branches/tags are related to directories in the repository, and may want to ignore that a branch is located at a particular path. And if you move branches/tags around, you may want the branch-context to stay the same ... I really don't know, I haven't thought too deeply about this. > --- > > Independently: can branches be nested? Say, can we have > > /subversion/trunk/tools/calc/trunk > > which gets carried along to > > /subversion/branches/1.7.x/tools/calc/trunk > > and then branches > > /subversion/trunk/tools/calc/branches/my-calc-branch > > and then someone backports that to the 1.7.x branch of calc > > /subversion/branches/1.7.x/tools/calc/branches/my-calc-branch > > and then someone asks what branch is that last thing a part of... Yikes, that would be very confusing. I'd say (from an enterprise / user standpoint): don't do that. If possible, this should be disallowed, maybe blocked by one of those branch/merge-policy things that were mentioned elsethread... -- Johan
