[ On Wednesday, March 29, 2000 at 15:00:19 (-0800), [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: Proposed new aliases, like HEAD
>
> I thought I read recently (either in Cederqvist, the CVS FAQ, or this list) that
> using "-r 1" was unsupported and not guarenteed to work in all versions of CVS,
> especially in the future.
There's nothing proscribing against "-r 1" in the manual right now (1.10.8).
> It is also ambiguous at best that using "-r 1" will
> automagically be interpreted properly if someone commits revision 2.1 or higher
> on the trunk, although your test shows that this works OK for your specific CVS
> release (1.10.8?).
First off nobody should ever bump the release numbers when using CVS.
If it's already been done when the repository lived a past live as a
plain RCS repository then you just have to remember that some CVS
operations may not work as expected. Most RCS operations using CVS
will work OK though.
I.e. it's not ambiguous at all if you happen to know that the specifics
of how RCS treats partially specified revision IDs and if you understand
what is supposed to happen in the various circumstances where you might
use them. Most of those rules carry forward to CVS even though
employing them either by accident or on purpose may not lead to the
long-term expected behaviour with CVS and indeed might even cause
problems and get in the way of CVS if you mix your metaphors too much.
> At the least, a simple, unambiguous, and well-documented way
> to refer to the newest revision on the trunk would be handy to have. It seems
> that defining a tag ".TRUNK" (or similar) would be the simplest way to
> accomplish this.
The problem though is that if indeed you want to handle the abberation
of bumped release numbers then it's not necessarily that simple to
implement. Of course if you don't care about bumped release numbers
then there's no need to worry about inventing a magic symbolic name
because "-r 1" will always work and those who really really really think
they need a symbolic name can just add their own "TRUNK" tag on "1" and
be done with it.
FYI, the manual is currently far too careless about documenting the use
of revision numbers and in particular does give license to those who
think they need to bump the release number. This part of the manual
needs to be struck out -- it's fine to allow this in the code for now
but it certainly should not be documented or openly supported in any
way.
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Secrets of the Weird <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
