Re: [boost] Organizing a large project with svn:externals (Was: Boost Development Environment proposal)

From: troy d straszheim (troy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-18 11:28:20

On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 09:34:40AM -0500, Rene Rivera wrote:
> > 
> > Oh man.  I was trying to interpret noise the whole time?  Egh.
> 
> Yea, the discussions can get confusing around here sometimes :-)
> 

Yeah.  Sorry.  :)

> > Ok so looking at the above I agree, of course they're essentially the
> > same thing.  This arrangement also does not preclude the use of
> > externals or other piecewise-checkout mechanism, and it is easy to
> > change should there be a need.  End.
> 
> Indeed, externals are a separate question. But reducing the need for 
> them is also a goal since using them is more work for developers. With 

The issue is if the overall net benefit offsets this additional
work...  my experience says that it does, by a lot.  In practice it
has been a few people (release manager types) that deal with the
externals.

> your mention of attaching the version number to the external itself I 
> think we can use them in that form (assuming we fix the http vs https 
> issue). So for externals we want:
> 
> * To always use version specific externals (-rNNN). Unless we have some 
> special uses, and are very careful.
> 
> * Only use them for historical collections.

The http vs. https thing is solvable (just allow anonymous https,
there may be other ways), but I don't follow here...  why would
externals be useful for historical collections only?  At what point in
the process would externals be introduced?

> > Ah, so the 'common use case' is that you want to check out the entire
> > sandbox.  Of course you're right, you can't do this when
> > tags/branches/trunk are together.  So what happens when somebody
> > checks a garbage project in to /sandbox/trunk/garbage?  Does this ruin
> > your day, or do you have some way to mark it as unwanted?
> 
> So you mean if someone checks in a project that has tags/branches below 
> it? Or the general someone checks in a project that I'm not interested 
> in? The former is what I'm trying to avoid, 

Right.

> and the latter is by 
> definition not applicable. 
[snip]

Ok, that makes sense.  Thanks.

-t