Switching from CVS to Subversion: test svn repo available

[Stuart D. Gathman]

On Mon, 24 Oct 2005, Chris Shoemaker wrote:

> > > Here's a fun link to git's author's opinion on the matter:
> > > http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/git/0504/0594.html
> > 
> > The main point here is that per file tracking is wrong - and I would
> > agree.  Maybe I'm missing something, but from what I have read, SVN
> > stores version trees of filesets rather than files - that is its motivation for
> > replacing CVS.  Sure, it is storing version trees of the fileset rather
> > than a collection of changesets for the fileset, but the above rant doesn't
> > seem to apply to SVN.
> 
> You might agree or disagree with the premise but the rant *certainly*
> applies to SVN.  The links above will explain.

I'm sorry, I must be dense.  I reread the rant, and it is all
about "the single-file mentality is a disease".  I read more of
the links about SVN, and it certainly doesn't have a 
"single-file" mentality as I understand it.  It operates atomically on an
entire repository.  It atomically applies a changeset - eventhough
it actually updates (atomically) the repository and recomputes
the changeset when requested, rather than storing the changeset and
recomputing the files when requested as you advocate.

Now perhaps "single-file mentality" means something more than its
face value.  For instance, perhaps the "file" being referred to
is a repository rather than a source file, and the rant against "single-file
mentality" is really a rant against a centralized server - which SVN certainly
is.  Am I on the right track here?  Is the objection to SVN that it is 
centralized, and there is a "single-file" (plus backups) that represents a
repository instead of multiple "files" distributed over the internet?

The distributed vision seems to be that loosely connected sites collect
changesets, and a release is constructed on any one of those systems by
specifying a particular selection of changesets (the ones that produced
a particular working directory, for instance) and giving it a release
version number.

-- 
	      Stuart D. Gathman <stuart at bmsi.com>
    Business Management Systems Inc.  Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
"Confutatis maledictis, flamis acribus addictis" - background song for
a Microsoft sponsored "Where do you want to go from here?" commercial.