Re: CVS Version CHange

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, December 3, 2003 at 12:36:35 (-0600), address@hidden wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: CVS Version CHange
>
> Could be.  The RCS revision number looks too much like a standard sort
> of release designation, and that leads to trouble.  It appears to
> contain more information than is needed to specify a revision.  I
> like the idea of giving the revisions simple numbers (as Subversion
> does) to show their arbitrariness.

Yes, that's sort of what I was getting at.

> On the other hand, it is nice to have ways to avoid making irretrievable
> mistakes (and removing or moving a tag can be that).

Indeed.  It's just important to very clearly make the distinction
between fat-finger-avoidance features and policy enforcement features.

>  I've made many
> of those in my lifetime despite knowing better.  As the CVS admin, I
> managed to remove a branch tag from a directory once, and then modified
> one of my principles ("Never hit the return/enter key before you
> carefully examined what you've just typed") for doing such by adding
> the clause "and it doesn't count as careful examination if anybody is
> talking to you at the time".

I couldn't have said it better myself!  :-)

In theory the CVSROOT/history file could be used to log the revision
number from each file when a tag is applied and such a log could be used
both to undo such fat-finger-mistakes as well as to do basic audits to
detect whether tags had been moved or not.  I seem to remember asking
for such a feature way back before CVS-II was first officially released,
and once upon a time I even started to work on implementing it, but for
some reason I've never found it important enough to actually finish the
job (even though it's relatively simple!).

-- 
                                                Greg A. Woods

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