Re: version control process improvement

["Richard Guenther" <richard dot guenther at gmail dot com>]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 12:24 AM, Ben Elliston <bje@au1.ibm.com> wrote:
> I was speaking to Andrew Tridgell yesterday about how he uses svn with
>  the Samba project.  He mentioned an idea that we could pursue in the GCC
>  project.
>
>  As you know, Subversion keeps all branches and the trunk under different
>  paths in the repository.  Thus, it's possible to check out multiple
>  branches under a single directory tree.  eg:
>
>   ~/source
>         gcc
>           branches/gcc-4.2
>           branches/gcc-4.3
>           trunk
>
>  I don't know if anyone else does it this way; I don't.  By doing it this
>  way, it's possible to apply a patch to multiple branches and commit them
>  in a single changeset.  This has the advantage of allowing us to track
>  all of the branches a patch was committed to (at least initially;
>  someone may of course backport the patch at a later stage) with svn-log
>  -v.

Interesting.  But this doesn't match up with (my) usual style of applying
patches to branches only after they got some exposure on the trunk.
I suppose the real weakness of SVN is that it doesn't track origin
of merges (that is, merges are just applied patches apart from literally
copied files).

Richard.