On Sun, 30 Oct 2005, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> > I fail to see any reason for this. When you don't need a file anymore, you
> > delete it. When you don't need a directory anymore, you delete it. I can't
> > see
> > why it should be any different for branches. Deleting a branch makes life
> > easier for people looking for branches, reduce the noise, and makes the
> > repository cleaner.
>
> Yeah. personally, i'd like to remove them too.
>
> You can always see them with the [EMAIL PROTECTED] syntax
>
> ie
>
> svn ls svn://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Which requires remembering an arbitrary revision number (i.e., making life
*harder* not *easier* for people looking for that branch) rather than a
more meaningful branch name. Naming things should allow one to get away
from such arbitrary numbers.
Abstractly, the history where a branch has been merged into mainline is
mainline -------------------------------------------- current mainline
\ /
\ /
branch-------
(where the branch is ancestral to the current mainline, and logically
branch-of-today is a hard link to mainline-of-tofay), not
mainline --------------------------------------------- current mainline
\
\
branch------dead
and while version control doesn't effectively represent the first form
(multiple versions at the same time being ancestral to the same current
version), I don't think tricks with revision numbers should be needed to
see the ancestry of mainline.
In order to avoid referencing arbitrary revision numbers, you might create
a naming scheme by which you assign symbolic names to "the last version of
branch X". (For a similar use, I might find it useful to tag
trunk/gcc/@42778, the last version before *.texi were moved to doc/, for
more convenient access to the pre-move logs - the issue of seeing ancestry
of mainline more conveniently applies just as much to files renamed in CVS
as it does to bifurcated history caused by branches.) Such naming of a
particular revision number for more memorable access to its history is of
course just a cheap copy with history, which is what you get if you move
the branch to branches/closed, which is back where we started.
--
Joseph S. Myers http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal mail)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (CodeSourcery mail)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)
