Subject: Re: Feedback outside of the user survey

From: Christian Jaeger <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:43:51 +0200

Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> Christian Jaeger wrote:
>> If you really wanted, I suppose you could additionally look into 
>> implementing a kind of shallow cloning that only copies objects over 
>> the wire which are necessary for representing the subdirectory you're 
>> interested in.
>>
>
> So what do you do when one such commit also affects something outside
> the subdirectory?

You haven't said what you mean with "affect".

Since the point is that you do not want to see any effect to be made nor 
described if it is about something outside the subdirectory, the program 
would just not look at those?

Did you mean, new commits to be made from changed subdirectory contents? 
The stuff outside the subdirectory would just be kept the same and thus 
again doesn't need to be present locally.

Did you mean merging branches where one or more of the branches have 
changes outside the working directory? As long as the changes from the 
branches don't touch any of the same files (outside the 
subworkingdirectory), there's no need to fetch the files' contents, the 
program is only interested in the changes in the directory listings 
(thus directory objects). Now if there *are* changes to the same files 
(and outside the subworkingdirectory), the program would certainly need 
to fetch those contents, too, to be able to create the new contents. 
Would it require a place in the working directory? Yes if there are 
conflicts which need to be resolved manually, since it needs a place to 
put the conflicts to ask the user to resolve.  So I guess it boils down 
to SVN having a different notion of what a merge entails?

Christian.