In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Greg A. Woods wrote: >[ On , October 11, 2001 at 10:39:50 (-0400), Sam Steingold wrote: ] >> Subject: Re: [[EMAIL PROTECTED]: Re: rename in cvs] >> >> why? this is the same file. > >no, actually it is not.
It's only not the same file because of the braindamaged version control system which cannot represent that semantic idea! As far as the user is concerned, it is the same file, under a different name. Merely, the software has failed to capture the user's perfectly sensible idea. Instead, it provided a half-baked emulation: delete the old, recreate under new name. This breaks seriously, for instance, under merging. Suppose work takes place on FOO on a branch. Then on the trunk FOO is removed, and a BAR is created with identical contents, in order to emulate a rename. When the branch is later merged, the FOO patches will not be applied to BAR. Moving the patches to BAR will require error-prone manual work. This should be pereceived as enough of a problem to completely deter clueful users form trying to rename files. The best way to view CVS is that it does not handle renames at all, so don't even think about ever doing it using *any* of the methods recommended in the manual. I can live without being able to view the complete history of the object in one piece. But the other breakage, in particular merging, makes it totally unacceptable to do a rename. I accept the limitation only because CVS has open source code, a suitable redistribution license, good reliability and a set of capabilities that is good enough for many purposes. _______________________________________________ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs
