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Re: RFC: Moving C to its own directory
Phil Edwards <phil@jaj.com> writes:
> On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 01:10:34PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Phil Edwards <phil@jaj.com> writes:
>>
>> > If we're willing to get a little underhanded, we can do the shuffling in
>> > the repository directory structure itself, i.e., cp/mv the foo,v files
>> > directly.
>>
>> The huge problem with mv is that you break all your old tags and branches
>> that don't pick up the required changes to the Makefiles as well, so you
>> can no longer check out old versions.
>>
>> cp avoids this, but has a different problem of giving you both the old and
>> the new locations when you check out an old version. What you have to do
>> is cp the ,v files and then remove all the old tags from the new ,v files,
>> and then cvs remove all of the old files from the mainline. It's messy,
>> ugly work with RCS file internals.
>
> In fact, I believe that latter method is how many projects do it.
I'm not a huge fan of this technique -- it can cause interesting
failure modes down the road, e.g. it can land you with foo.c,v and
Attic/foo.c,v in the same directory. However, I don't think the
history discontinuity is as big a problem as some other people seem to
feel it is.
We also have to think carefully about the impact on branches.
I believe the BSD folks use this technique extensively; perhaps they
have some scripts that could help?
zw