Re: CVS soft-tagging + other problems & solutions

[Yaron Yogev]

On Aug 15, 4:13 pm, Frank Hemer <fr...@hemer.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday 15 August 2007 12:56, yar...@jungo.com wrote:
>
> > Hello,
>
> > Following is a rather lengthy discussion of problems that we at Jungo
> > LTD have
> > faced with using CVS, and solutions used. We especially go into
> > details of a
> > new concept we call 'soft-tagging'. This concept was such a success
> > with our
> > users that we feel obliged to spread the idea.
>
> > The implementation originates in code from the newtags2 patch
> > available on the
> > Savannah.gnu.org CVS server, extending the concept of built-in
> > (calculated)
> > tags.
>
> Just skimming your improvements, it appears there are some real benefits
> incorporated.
>
> Noticing you mentioned the newtags2 branch, I remember having sent one more
> patch against newtags2 branch that fixes some smaller issues with the
> newtags.
> IIRC, this patch never got commited but should still be available in the
> archives. I wonder whether this final patch also has been integrated into
> your patch?
>
> Frank


Hello Frank,

Before starting work on the soft-tags feature, we merged the changes
from the The CVS repository of GNU CVS, on top of branch newtags2. we
did not merge your patch into it.

However, the main connection between newtags2 and soft-tags is in the
concept level: extending the concept of symbolic tags to be much more
dynamic. newtags2 added predefined tags postfixes that give computed
tags in combination with existing hard-tags.
soft-tags allows adding tags as meta-data outside the RCS files. The
tags locations on the files in the repository are calculated in real-
time. when doing 'cvs update', most of the time is taken by the
opening & reading of the RCS file, so the added calculation does not
make a noticeable difference in performance.

I therefore think your patch can be examined separately from the Jungo
improvements, soft-tags included.
Perhaps the maintainers will decide to merge both together - but this
probably depends on me providing a separate patch for soft-tags, not
just a big patch of so many things at once.
These initial letter & patch were meant to start a conversation so we
can see how to guide our efforts.

Yaron