Re: Weird shallow-tree conversion state, and branches of shallow trees

From: Bill Lear <rael@zopyra.com>
Date: Apr 16, 2007, 00:11 UTC
Message-ID: <17954.48933.484379.593657@lisa.zopyra.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0704151317180.5473@woody.linux-foundation.org>

On Sunday, April 15, 2007 at 13:51:42 (-0700) Linus Torvalds writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

>On Sun, 15 Apr 2007, Andy Parkins wrote:
>> 
>> You're right that it can cause problems, but it is certainly not the 
>> case that there are no valid uses for it.
>
>I'm sorry, but you're just wrong.
>
>There are no valid uses for it in the working tree. Full stop.
>
>There are valid uses to tag sources with some revision information WHEN IT 
>LEAVES THE REVISION CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT, but not one second before 
>that. ...

Not that Linus needs any back-up from me, but I second this, very strongly. Decorating source code with release information is a proper function of release management tools, not the SCM system. We had a similar argument in our company about this, sparked by a criticism of git for not having keyword (version number) substitution, and I argued that having such substitution functions in the SCM was out-of-place and a crutch for weak release procedures. It's easy with a proper make system to put whatever information you want from the SCM into the release product.

This would probably be as crazy as asking for saving and restoring timestamps in the working tree on checkout of branches, and we know how insane that is...

Bill