[SvnBook] #20: Book oversimplifies SVN vs. CVS "revisions"

SvnBook noreply at red-bean.com
Fri May 12 13:07:18 CDT 2006


#20: Book oversimplifies SVN vs. CVS "revisions"
---------------------+------------------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  maxb     |       Owner:  nobody
     Type:  defect   |      Status:  new   
 Priority:  normal   |   Milestone:        
Component:  content  |     Version:        
 Keywords:           |  
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 Moved from: http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1697

 In Appendix A, "Subversion for CVS Users", section "Revision Numbers are
 Different Now," (http://svnbook.red-bean.com/html-chunk/apa.html), we find
 this text:

     Technically, it's not valid to talk about “revision 5 of foo.c”.
 Instead, one would say “foo.c as it appears in revision 5”. [...]

 That's OK as far as it goes, but it really should also mention that, in
 CVS, you can say "the latest version on branch REL1 of foo.c," and this,
 too, looks different in SVN; one would say "branches/REL1/.../foo.c, as it
 appears in revision 5."

 There's also a sketch of the technical reasons why the SVN concepts are
 different from the CVS ones, for the term-shift that's mentioned.  It
 doesn't cover the branch business, so a technical text expansion is
 probably in order as well.  Here's a stab at the whole addition, which I
 imagine being a paragraph all its own, after the one I partially quoted,
 and before the "for further details" reference:

 "Similarly, in CVS a tag or branch is an annotation on the file, or on the
 version information for that individual file, whereas in Subversion a tag
 or branch is a copy of an entire tree (by convention, into the branches/
 or tags/ directories that appear at the top level of the repository,
 beside trunk/).  In the repository as a whole, many versions of each file
 may be visible: the latest version on each branch, every tagged version,
 and of course the latest version on the trunk itself.  So, to refine the
 terms even further, one would often say "foo.c as it appears in
 branches/REL1 in revision 5."

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://svnbook.red-bean.com/trac/ticket/20>
SvnBook <http://svnbook.red-bean.com/>


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