RCS Comparison table and ease of use

[Nicholas Allen]

Matthew Hannigan wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 03:20:48PM +0100, Nicholas Allen wrote:
>   
>>  ...  But I agree that svn does not really 
>> support this [tags]
>>     
>
> I think that's overstating it.  SVN clearly does
> support tags.  You can argue with the niceness of the
> implementation, but they work for me.
I have updated the table to say that it has limited support with a 
footnote explaining why I think it is not full tag support. Nearly every 
version control system supports branching and so calling a branch the 
same thing as a tag is twisting the meaning of tag quite a bit - in that 
case every VCS supports tags including Bazaar and that would defeat the 
usefulness of putting it in the table.

I have defined what I think a tag is and I hope that it is clear that 
there is a difference between a tag and a branch. At least from a user's 
perspective there is a clear difference. I am defining a tag is a 
meaningful label that can be attached to a revision identifier and used 
in place of that revision identifier (and so should be able to be used 
as a command line argument wherever a revision identifier can be 
specified). Subversion tags require that no developer commits to a 
directory under "tags" (as really they are branches that no one should 
commit too) and it is not possible to use the tag name as a label for a 
revision in any command that takes a revision identifier.

For example I cannot do this in svn:

svn diff -r VERSION1_0:3425 svn://host/trunk/project

There is a workaround of course:

svn diff svn://host/tags/project/VERSION1_0 svn://host/trunk/project@3425

Nick