propose: all arch move into a separate dir

Robert Watson rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Fri Mar 5 13:21:34 UTC 2010


On Fri, 5 Mar 2010, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> In message <alpine.BSF.2.00.1003050940290.5181 at fledge.watson.org>, Robert 
> Watso n writes:
>
>> [...] it's that changes in layout come with a less visible but much larger 
>> cost than "svn mv".
>
> Really stupid question:  Doesn't svn support symlinks ?

Yes, but does that help?  The issue is not user applications that can't find 
their header files, it's people who maintain patchsets in revision control 
systems, such as svn, Perforce, git, etc, whose work will be derailed when 
automatic merging fails.  As I said, I've run into this with the TrustedBSD 
work several times: someone rearranges files in the network stack or VFS and 
you're left trying to figure out where the code moved, how to re-apply your 
changes, whether you've missed anything, etc.  Continuity over time in code 
location makes that task orders of magnitude easier, and costs the project 
little.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge


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