[Zope-dev] Re: Zope 2.9.4

Tim Peters tim.peters at gmail.com
Sat Jul 15 15:55:42 EDT 2006


[Tim]
>> I used tags for ZODB until I gave in to complaints about that, and
>> switched to using revision numbers.  The real complaint about using a
>> tagged external is that when the tag changes, SVN isn't smart enough
>> to do an incremental update.  Instead, when you update after an
>> external tag changes:

[Andreas]
> What do you mean with "when the tag changes"?

Not what I said:  I said "[when] an /external/ tag" changes".  I mean
when you change an external tag _in_ project A _referencing_ the
external tagged project B.  Here A=Zope and B=ZODB, and the external
tags in question are the ones referencing ZODB from within the
svn:externals properties of various Zope directories.

> A tag IMO should *never* change.

The revision number associated with a tag within project B indeed
shouldn't change.  That's not what I'm talking about.  I'm talking
about how other projects reference project B:  they have a choice of:

1. making their own copy of B
2. using svn:externals with a tag for B
3. using svn:externals with a revision number for B

Read my msg again with that in mind, and it will make much more sense
to you.  I was describing the complaints about using choice #2.

Zope Corp has tried all of those at various times.  They all have
different drawbacks, but the only one I found horribly unusable was #1
(because then N different projects have copies of B, and changes to
copies of B's code get made from N different projects, and nobody
bothers to merge those changes back into B itself -- people changing a
copy of B from a different project often don't even _know_ they're
changing "conceptually external" code; in effect, without absurd
effort on the part of B's maintainer(s), the world ends up with B plus
N forks of B).

> ...


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