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From: | Dalibor Topic |
Subject: | Re: [Classpathx-xml] Cleaning up CVS tags from code |
Date: | Thu, 13 Nov 2003 17:06:15 +0100 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312 |
Nic Ferrier wrote:
Dalibor Topic <address@hidden> writes:Would you accept a patch that removes those tags ($Id, $Date, etc.) from the sources?I see no objection but I prefer to be seconded before applying it (so maybe wait an other '+1' before doing it ;))No, don't do that please. We use them to keep track of stuff.Thanks for the quick reply.Could you elaborate on that? I've never used those tags myself, so I'm wondering what further information they could provide that CVS doesn't.It just means it's recorded in the file so if we move the file from that CVS to another one it keeps at least that information.
Not in my experience. Consider the $Id string in http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/classpathx/jaxp/source/gnu/xml/util/XMLWriter.java?rev=1.8&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup vs. the one in http://www.kaffe.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/kaffe/libraries/javalib/gnu/xml/util/XMLWriter.java?rev=1.1&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markupit's completely different. the author, the date. just the file name is the same. That's because the contents of those tags are automatically insterted by RCS/CVS upon checkin, AFAIK. So when you move the file from one CVS to another, as in 'check it in', the old $Id tag gets overwritten by a new one, causing a frivolous difference in files.
But I may be ignorant of other possibilities to move files between CVS archives, so it would be nice if you could elaborate some more on that one.
I'm suprised you haven't used the tags. They're quite common.
They seem to be purged from projects as soon as the projects become important enough that people want to use those projects as 'upstream' providers of sources. See discussions why those tags were purged from GCC's Ada sources:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-03/msg00557.html here's a few more quotes from gcc developers: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/1999-08n/msg00760.html http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-03/msg00560.html See also this thread on lack of use of RCS tags in GNU emacs: http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2001-05/msg00042.html with GNU emacs developers' comments on evilness of tags: http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2001-05/msg00088.html http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2001-05/msg00095.html http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2001-05/msg00062.html Just to show that I'm not making the problems up ;)So I'm still interested in what RCS tags provide for you that cvs log doesn't, or the cvsweb interface.
cheers, dalibor topic
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