(A quick review of an existing "Shelve" utility.) A reader kindly emailed me to point out the existence of an "SVN Shelve" utility on CodeProject.com,
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/29599/SVN-Shelve in case there is anything I could learn from it. So I took a look. It was created by Oleg Vorkunov in 2008 and runs on Windows. This is the essence of its design, according to the description and screen shots. (I didn't try it or look at the source code; the explanation was enough.) * Terminology: Each snapshot is "a shelf". * Shelving: You select a versioned folder and provide a description. "All the modified files will be copied into a folder you dedicated for shelving, under a GUID-like folder name. [Then] you will be prompted about reverting all the changes you have done to the source folder." * Unshelving: It lists the description and date of each shelf. On clicking "Restore", "The original folder will be updated to a revision the shelf was created from, and all the files from the selected shelf will be copied back to the original folder the way they were before you shelved it. At the end of the operation, you will be prompted to delete the shelf." * Storage: A specified folder on the local disk. It is suggested that you might want to version-control this folder, in order to back up and/or to share your shelved changes. So, simple but effective. I don't know how well it dealt with changes other than simple file content changes, but that isn't important now. Suggestions I might learn from this are: * On shelving, reverting the changes is optional; on unshelving, deleting the shelf is optional. My prototype command-line UI already has these options, both defaulting to "yes"; it is good to see this also in another implementation. * On unshelving, it first updates the WC to the original base revision. Therefore it does not have to be concerned with merging or patching or conflicts. It might be good for us to offer that mode of operation as an option. It is conceptually similar to git's option to apply a stash onto a new branch. * This simple implementation was useful enough to attract some positive comments from other users. - Julian
