Next message: Clemm, Geoff: "RE: draft-ietf-deltav04.5 now available"
Date: Sun, 07 May 2000 20:28:03 -0700
From: Dan Kegel <dank@alumni.caltech.edu>
To: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org
Message-id: <39163443.F2C3462A@alumni.caltech.edu>
Subject: Three questions, and a paean to Perforce
Newbie here, with three questions.
I've been using revision control systems for 17 years,
from futz-with-diff-and-patch to RCS to CVS to MKS SI
to SourceSafe to Perforce and back.
One thing that always was mysterious until recently
was branching. Nobody I knew ever used it successfully,
since the complicated revision ids it caused were confusing.
That is, until Perforce.
Perforce has a universal naming convention that lets you represent
documents in the central depot as well as in working areas.
e.g. if the central depot is called 'depot', and I've created a workspace
named 'dan_work', the document ks/dev/main.c is referred to as
//depot/ks/dev/main.c in the central depot, and as
//dan_work/ks/dev/main.c in my workspace.
Perforce uses this naming scheme to do the impossible: make branches understandable!
It uses a geographical paradigm: rather than encoding
the fact of the branch in a collection of documents' version ids,
it makes you encode it in the collection's path.
For instance, if I want to branch the collection of documents under
ks/dev, and call the new branch 1.1, I give a command that copies
all files under ks/dev to the new area ks/1.1. Version ids of
the new files under ks/1.1 start from #1.
This strategy lets Perforce get away with very simple version ids,
yet have all the power one needs to do branching of whole collections
of documents in what seems like a sensible way to me.
I'm sure I haven't done Perforce justice with this description.
If you want to read more, see http://www.perforce.com
My questions are:
1. does WebDAV's proposed versioning model support
the paradigm Perforce uses? i.e. do Perforce commands map cleanly
onto the proposed versioning model?
I would love to be able to continue using Perforce-like tools
for source code management and have them talk to the same
backend as the marketing people use to do their web authoring
with their cute little gui tools (bleh).
2. Has anyone else on this list used Perforce?
3. I notice that Christopher Seiwald (seiwald@perforce.com)
was a frequent contributer to this list several years ago.
Is anyone from Perforce currently represented here?
Thanks,
Dan
--
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.