[Zope-dev] [Fwd: Zope Tests: 4 OK, 2 Failed]

[Martin Aspeli]

Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Godefroid Chapelle wrote:
>> Tres Seaver wrote:
>>
>>> As an aside / vent:  the reason for the now-removed EXTERNALS.txt files
>>> was to keep the canonical information about the externals in a diffable
>>> file:  why subversion can't do a proper diff on its own line-oriented
>>> property is beyond me.  Another benefit of an EXTERNALS.txt file was
>>> that it could be inspected in the web view of a directory, which isn't
>>> true for the svn:externals property itself.
>>>
>>>
>>> Tres.
>> I want to support this. The noise made by keeping EXTERNALS.txt in svn 
>> is very low compared to the signal it provides.
> 
> I don't. EXTERNALS.txt is only useful if your tools suck. There are
> perfectly capable svn commit mailers and web browsers that show
> property changes correctly.

I'm normally not one to play the "get better tools" argument, but 
EXTERNALS.txt have a tendency to drift out of sync with reality when 
people get used to "svn pe .", and confuse people who (not unreasonably) 
think that this is a "magic" file and so edit it and forget to do "svn 
ps svn:externals -F EXTERNALS .".

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book