a thoroughly disruptive suggestion for the book

C. Michael Pilato cmpilato at red-bean.com
Fri Jun 12 07:35:24 CDT 2009


Ben's right about the history there.  I recall that feeling of "Huh?!" the
first time I saw someone start referring to a "repo" (made me think about
"repossession", as in "the repo man").  Still, the newbies are best served
by the strongest clarity we can afford.  Besides, couldn't "libsvn_repos" be
the "Repositories Library"  ;-)

Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> I agree as well, but I want to point out that not everyone says
> 'repo'.  In the early days, everyone said 'repos' as it if it were
> singular... that's why the svn library is named libsvn_repos ("the
> repository library"), not libsvn_repo.  :-)
> 
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 1:27 PM, C. Michael Pilato<cmpilato at red-bean.com> wrote:
>> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>>>   i'm sure that this suggestion is going to get laughed off the
>>> mailing list but, when i first started reading the book so many moons
>>> ago, i was perpetually confused by the reference to, say:
>>>
>>>   http://svn.example.com:9834/repos
>>>                               ^^^^^
>>>
>>> i kept reading "repos" as the *plural* of "repo" when, clearly, it's
>>> meant to refer to a *single* repository.  but because *everyone* i
>>> know (including everyone on the svn ML) *always* abbreviates
>>> repository as "repo", what about making that global change throughout
>>> all of the URLs?
>>>
>>>   i told you you wouldn't like it.  but, seriously, "repos" has the
>>> potential for real confusion for beginners.  just my $0.02.
>> This isn't the first time someone has made this point, and for what it's
>> worth, I agree.  I'd rather the book just assume that folks will have more
>> than one repository, and use examples that have /svn as a parent directory
>> (or service name, if you will), and /svn/project or /svn/projectN as the
>> repositories -- just avoid the whole repo/repos thing altogether.
>>
>> --
>> C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato at red-bean.com> | http://cmpilato.blogspot.com/
>>
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-- 
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato at red-bean.com> | http://cmpilato.blogspot.com/




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