on Sun Aug 26 2007, Rene Rivera <grafikrobot-AT-gmail.com> wrote:
David Abrahams wrote:
on Sat Aug 25 2007, "Robert Ramey" <ramey-AT-rrsd.com> wrote:
The merging into the trunk was very confusing to me and I had to spend a lot of time getting things on my machine balled up and then unballed up. Here are a couple of things.
First of all, i had hoped I could just "merge" the changes on my branch directly into the trunk. There may be a way to do this with the command line interface but the windows interface doesn't let you do it.
Subversion is a command-line tool, not a GUI. There is no "windows interface to Subversion." Somebody built a GUI that is an imperfect reflection of the underlying tool.
That is less than accurate for Subversion. All the Subversion GUIs and CLIs, AFAIK, use the same Subversion library.
Yes.
So in a sense they are all UIs to the same tool.
Yes. And there's no windows-specific interface to Subversion, other than those produced by parties other than the Subversion developers. That's all I menat.
And hence the "svn" command is just as much an "imperfect reflection of the underlying tool" as TortoiseSVN.
Except that it's the reference UI, and it's produced by the subversion developers.
Once you understand the command line, it's easy to go back to a GUI and have a sense of what it's really doing.
I found it harder to understand what Subversion is really doing from all the reading of the book, docs, etc. I found it much easier to understand just by using the TSVN repo browser.
$ svn --help merge
In the TSVN context menu "ToroiseSVN/Merge...", brings up a dialog with all the options with much better explanations then "svn --help". And with immediate access to the repo browser in various places. And with the ability to do diffs directly in the dialog (which integrates with WinMerge if you want). And with the ability to pick merge revision directly from the log, which means one doesn't have to remember the revision numbers which is the number one annoyance (and source of mistakes) for doing "svn merge".
Nobody should have to look at the log either. We should be using svnmerge.py
Please don't make the mistake of prejudging the available SVN GUI tools based on your bad experiences with CVS GUI tools.
I never had a bad experience with them. I use SVN and CVS "GUI" tools from within emacs; they're very useful. In fact, I love them. That said, I have a decent grounding in how the tools work because I read the official documentation and familiarized myself with the interfaces it describes. I want other Boost developers to have the same grounding, for their own sakes, and for mine (so the repo doesn't get messed up). -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://www.boost-consulting.com The Astoria Seminar ==> http://www.astoriaseminar.com