[Gnu-arch-users] Re: the state of the union

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>

    > Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:
    > >   For one thing, we need changeset orientation.  The Subversion users
    > >   are visibly feeling the pain of its absense.  All of the other
    > >   systems are changeset oriented.

    > I thought that "changeset orientation" just meant that all changes to a
    > source tree can be committed to the repository as an atomic step, and
    > these atomic steps have convenient names.

    > Doesn't subversion have this...?

It's a little bit of a slippery point but it's a good one to catch and
digest:  

Subversion fails to be *usefully* changeset oriented because it is
*uselessly* changeset oriented:

It's uselessly changeset oriented because each commit revs *the entire
repository*.   Yet SVN best practice is to keep many different
branches in a repository.   Thus, svn is changeset oriented, but the
changes aren't *tree changes* -- their multi-branch repository
changes.  If you try to use the repository-oriented changesets as
tree-oriented changesets you can get into trouble (play around with
merging across branches after asymmetric file renames, for example).

(The core svn developers are pretty clear about this, actually.
When people ask questions of the form "Why does merging work so
poorly in case _____?", they give pretty accurate answers.)

SVN is changeset oriented in the "bullet point" sense -- not the "gets
the point" sense. :-(

-t