From: Beman Dawes (beman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-07-19 07:47:05
At 09:34 AM 7/18/2000 -1000, Thomas Plum wrote:
>Tracking structure changes (renaming, changing dir structure, etc) has
>been a problem with all the source control I've seen so far, and I've
>used "roll-your-own" approaches in our small shop. But just now a
>technique occurs to me ...
>
>How about adding a new shell-script component at the top-level dir
>named e.g. structure-changes.ksh , with this intended use: All the
>component source files are maintained with their original names, and
>their original place in the dir structure, but after extracting a
>complete source set, the structure-changes.ksh script is executed,
>which re-names, removes, moves, etc, as needed to produce the
>"latest and greatest" product structure. One benefit comes for free ...
>each structural change becomes an ordinary text-file change for the
>source-control to track, along with all the other source-file changes.
That strikes me as being a useful technique, but only as a workaround for a
version control system shortcoming. Another workarounds might include
adding a comment to the file involved indicating its old name or old
directory. That way these name changes will at least show up on
diffs. But again, that's just a workaround.
It really seems a first class version control system could track directory
and file name changes along with text changes.
Experienced users of a system have often become hardened to the system's
shortcomings. These same shortcomings stand out like a sore thumb to new
users. I guess we ought to let the CVS maintainers know our needs.
--Beman