Re: [boost] trunk vs release

Subject: Re: [boost] trunk vs release
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-05-24 11:51:00

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 11:38 AM, troy d. straszheim <troy_at_[hidden]>wrote:

> Beman Dawes wrote:
>
>> On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Vladimir Prus <vladimir_at_[hidden]
>> >wrote:
>>
>>  troy d. straszheim wrote:
>>>
>>>  I share your worry.   Probably some scm mechanism should take care of
>>>> it.   I'm out of ideas for the moment.
>>>>
>>> svn:externals in SVN allow you to have master copies of headers say in
>>>
>>>       libs/thread/include
>>>
>>> and have a copy checked out into
>>>
>>>      boost/thread
>>>
>>> while making commits in boost/thread work, and commit into the master
>>> copy. Disk requirements are a question, though.
>>>
>>
>>
>> I also really worried about this header issue.
>>
>> Volodya, thanks for the svn:externals suggestion. I'll try to learn more
>> about svn:externals so I can form an opinion.
>>
>>
> I said I was "out of ideas", but that was a little disingenuous.  This is
> certainly one of many possible implementations, but I urge caution here.
>  We've been using svn:externals for subproject management for a while,
> against the conventional wisdom.    It makes merging even harder, can turn a
> large difficult-to-merge project into an impossible to merge project.  You
> can end up needing to write tools to wrangle your externals.  It won't be
> too hard to make a sample implementation to show how it works, I think this
> will help clarify things.

Is this a project that does project-wide merges? I can see how that might be
a problem.

Boost developers and release managers, OTOH, don't ever do project wide
merges. Instead, everything happens on a library by library basis. I would
expect merging a single library would be easier if its header files lived
entirely within the library's boost-root/libs/libname tree.

What am I missing?

--Beman