[Dev] Subversion directory structuring

[Alec Flett]

Heikki Toivonen wrote:
> where we put in the CVS tags into tags directory and CVS branches into
> the branches directory. Now, svn strictly speaking does not support
> tags. (Tags are supposed to be static, and never change.) But the way we
> did the cvs to svn conversion we emulated tags with the tags directory.
>   
Personally I think tags (along with the actual term "tag") are just an 
artifact of CVS - they covered the need in CVS to designate one frozen 
point in time across files which each had their own version number, and 
those tags were immovable to simulate the notion of a particular set of 
versions being read-only.

In SVN, those frozen points in time are more or less the same thing as 
branches. Its true we don't want anything changing in the 0.6.1 
directory after the release, but perhaps subversion offers something 
more specific to subversion, like locking down a directory?

It seems like maintaining a "tags" directory is a device to maintain a 
legacy notion of version control, rather than accomplish the real goal 
of locking down a particular branch.

Alec


> Many other projects work like this, for example Twisted. I think we
> should do so as well.
>
> The way I think of branches is something that changes, like the trunk.
> So, I would expect we'd have the 0.6 branch from which we take a
> snapshot into the 0.6 tag, and again into 0.6.1 tag and so on. In other
> words, the 0.6 branch continues to live on and checkins for the 0.6
> series can happen there. An image might clarify:
>
>
>            /---0.6 branch-*-*->
> ----trunk------------------------>
>
> (we'd copy 0.6 and 0.6.1 from the * points into the tags directory). In
> some rare cases we might branch from the branch, for example if we
> expected 0.6.1.1 and 0.6.0.1. (We could create a 0.6.1 branch from the
> 0.6.1 tag, so we could avoid a new branch unless we actually needed it.)
>
>
> Some people have complained that they don't want to see many branches or
> tags, and would like us to either delete old stuff or move them into
> some archives. I think both of these would be bad ideas because we have
> documentation pointing people on how to pull from a certain branch or
> tag - if we change something these are going to break.
>
> My preference would be to just put all branches directly into the
> branches dir and all tags directly into the tags dir.
>
> I don't see a problem with too many branches or tags, but if we must do
> something I would suggest a scheme where locations, once created, never
> change. So perhaps something like:
>
>   /branches
>     /0.6-branches
>   /tags
>     /0.6-tags
>
> Where all the branches we create during 0.6 development cycle go into
> the 0.6-branches, and all the tags into the 0.6-tags.
>
>   
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