Add documentation for branches/tags/trunk SVN assumptions

[elegant_dice]

I noticed that tailor was attempting to detect trunk, tags, branches directories. When it did detect them, it did not process them as I expected.

Please document what SVN directory structure is required for tailor to import tags as tags, etc. I assume that is the intent of the detection?

thanks Paul

[lele]

What do you mean with "tailor was attempting to detect trunk, tags, branches directories"?

Tailor doesn't know anything about the structure and conventions used by a SVN repo, and unfortunately tracking Subversion tags is very difficult, because one have to follow a completely different subtree just to notice something were tagged...

[elegant_dice]

Replying to lele:

What do you mean with "tailor was attempting to detect trunk, tags, branches directories"?

Tailor doesn't know anything about the structure and conventions used by a SVN repo, and unfortunately tracking Subversion tags is very difficult, because one have to follow a completely different subtree just to notice something were tagged...

Here is a log from tailor. It uses the same config as in ticket #65, except that the line 'module=/trunk/' now reads 'module=/'

22:35:08 [I] Bootstrapping "project" in "/home/paul/fatman/tailor"
22:35:08 [I] /home/paul/fatman/tailor/darcside $ darcs initialize
22:35:08 [I] [Ok]
22:35:08 [I] $ svn ls svn+ssh://two-up.homeip.net/home/svn/regional-repos
22:35:15 [I] [Ok]
22:35:15 [I] $ svn ls svn+ssh://two-up.homeip.net/home/svn
22:35:17 [W] [Status 1]
22:35:17 [I] $ svn log --verbose --xml --stop-on-copy --revision 1:HEAD --limit 1 svn+ssh://two-up.homeip.net/home/svn/regional-repos/trunk/
22:35:35 [I] [Ok]
22:35:35 [W] Ignoring u'/trunk' since it is not under '/trunk/'
22:35:35 [W] Ignoring u'/branches' since it is not under '/trunk/'
22:35:35 [W] Ignoring u'/tags' since it is not under '/trunk/'

*** It looks like it did assume that there would be 'branches' and 'tags' and 'trunk', but i'm not sure what the purpose is for.

22:35:35 [I] $ svn co --quiet --ignore-externals --revision 1 svn+ssh://two-up.homeip.net/home/svn/regional-repos/trunk/ /home/paul/fatman/tai
lor/svnside
22:35:43 [I] [Ok]

[lele]

When tailor bootstraps a new project, the first thing it does is a check to see if the URL given as repository points effectively to the root of the repository, otherwise it won't be able to correctly understand the paths, when parsing them from the svn log. There is an option, trust-root, that prevents this check.

But the fact that it's ignoring some paths indicate that you used /trunk/ as module name in this case too: most probably, the very first revision in the repository builds up the conventional structure of it, so that there is a single "patch" that touches several subtrees, and tailor ignores the entries not belonging to the tracked one. In your case, it ignores all of them, since you are starting from a point below.

But as said, tailor has no notion about the meaning of "/branches" or "/tags" (or "/trunk" even). It just migrate revisions touching files under the point indicated by repository/module.

Since in subversion a branch (or a tag) are just simple copies of subtrees, it has no way of determine the difference and thus recognizing the particular meaning.

To do what you ask, the subversion project could be enriched with other information, such as

repository = svn://some.server/svn
module = /productA/trunk/
trunk = /productA/trunk/
tags = /productA/tags/
branches = /productA/branches/

only at that point the backend would be able to recognize tags and branches. But again it would not be simple, for example because a tag may be retroactive (that is svn cp -r 10 /productA/trunk /productA/tags/version10)

[elegant_dice]

Ok that makes sense. I personally don't need the branches and tags, and I'd suggest to not enhance tailor in this regard since there are apparently several 'standard' ways to structure your SVN tree, so whatever you implement will probably not work for 60% of users who need the feature.

An additional (hopefully easy) question: since Tailor will work its way back up the paths to check for the true repository root, is there any difference in doing:

repository = svn://some.server/svn
module = /productA/trunk/

compared to:

repository = svn://some.server/svn/productA/trunk/
module = /

?

[lele]

Yes, since Tailor applies the principle "explicit is better than implicit", and thus it does not split the URL by itself (IIRC it prints out a suggestion in that case).

But surely it would be easy to add another flag to authorize Tailor to do the split, if this is a problem.

[HenryN]

The attachment monotone.branches is the config to convert Monotone source tree self to Subversion, it supports tags and branches, works only with the patch svn-target-branches.patch

Please see also the last complete patch on  http://www.henrynestler.com/tailor/

[HenryN]

tags for svn targets

[HenryN]

branches for svn targets

[HenryN]

set author and date after copy tags

[HenryN]

example config for using branches tags and trunk (svn as target)