Source Control Inheritance

I like subversion, mostly because they defined a small set of primitive concepts and build on them. Too often the temptation to add exotic features leaves source control products overly complex. All that said, there are some facets of Subversion that are a bit clunky. My suggestion is to extend the paradigm to include the notion of inheritance. Multiple inheritance would be best. Basically rather than just copied branches, there would also be inherited branches. Specifically, a branch could be given one or more ancestors. Changes made to ancestors would automatically be applied to the branch. Granted much careful thought should be given before integrating such a radical change, I think that this capability could be provided as a layer above the existing primitives. If so, the automation afforded would be great!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Until such a thing becomes available you can already use "branch inheritance by convention":

* Prefix the files/directories with their parent names.

* Use small helper shell script svnMergeChilds.sh to merge parent changes to all childs.

See: http://fvue.nl/svnMergeChilds/


Greetings,

Freddy Vulto
6:11 AM
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