[cvsnt] How to turn an erroneously set tag into a branch?

Oliver Giesen giesen at lucatec.de
Wed Sep 10 13:09:48 BST 2003


Victor,

> I disagree completely.  Tags identity exact points in time, 
> and you SHOULD 
> be able to decide that ANY point it time becomes a line of 
> development.  It 
> is folly to expect that a person ALWAYS knows whether a 
> branch will be 
> needed at the time a tag is created.
> 
> Can anyone explain why not ALL tags are branch tags?? and why 
> they aren't?

Well, one reason might be that it would probably be computationally more 
expensive to treat all tags as branches. Another point however is that 
if all tags were potentially branches, how would you then identify a 
specific point in time/development? You would no longer be sure that a 
tag invariably points to exactly one revision and that it always will be 
the same revision. If you use a branch tag to retrieve a revision, you 
will get not one specific revision but just the latest revision on that 
branch. That's a big difference.

If you want to create a branch off a specific tag, all you have to do 
is:

  cvs rtag -b -rBaseTag NewBranch Module

I don't see why that is such a problem. I think it is very essential to 
make a clear distinction between unique revision identifiers and 
symbolic names for development forks. As CVS currently does not have a 
mechanism for addressing branchpoints I'm putting tags whenever I branch 
anyway.

Cheers,

P.S.: I'm assuming you replied in private by accident and so I'm 
re-forwarding this back to the list. The CVSNT list requires you to 
manually reset the recipient to cvsnt at cvsnt.org for every reply. People 
frequently complain about this but so far, Tony can't be budged...

Oliver
----	------------------
JID:	ogiesen at jabber.org
ICQ:	18777742	(http://wwp.icq.com/18777742)


> -----Original Message-----
> From: vawjr [mailto:vawjr at rudbek.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2003 6:20 PM
> To: Giesen, Oliver
> Subject: RE: [cvsnt] How to turn an erroneously set tag into a branch?
> 
> 
> At Tuesday 2003-09-09 03:28, you wrote:
> >"Victor A. Wagner, Jr." wrote:
> >
> > > some year I'd like someone to explain WHY there are two
> > > different kinds of
> > > tags.
> > > I always thought it was kind of folly myself.
> >
> >No, tags and branches make perfect sense IMO. Tags identify 
> exact points
> >in time while branches identify lines of development. Both are _very_
> >needed concepts.
> 
> I disagree completely.  Tags identity exact points in time, 
> and you SHOULD 
> be able to decide that ANY point it time becomes a line of 
> development.  It 
> is folly to expect that a person ALWAYS knows whether a 
> branch will be 
> needed at the time a tag is created.
> 
> Can anyone explain why not ALL tags are branch tags?? and why 
> they aren't?
> 
> 



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