Re: [stellation-res] Urgent! Do Not Use Stellation CVS RepositoryUntil

[Jim Wright - IBM Research <jwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 02:50 PM 2/12/2003, Jonathan Gossage wrote:
> Maybe this should be an object lesson for us all. Say after me, "delete does
> not mean delete in an SCM system". Delete should mean "make unavailable for
> normal use" but should never mean "physically purge".

Actually, the CVS folders in question were not physically purged: I could 
restore them
from a previously-tagged version without a problem.
Perhaps (if I knew command-line CVS better) I could have simply "undeleted" 
the
folder deletion or reverted to a previous version of the 'src' folder for 
each of the
five projects so afflicted.  The Eclipse CVS client doesn't seem to support 
that, and
I didn't want to risk further damage to the repository, so I did it the 
hard way.

Agreed: SCM 'delete' should never do a physical purge, and there should 
*always*
be a way to undelete and restore a resource.

> We should provide an archive facility to clean out obsolete stuff from a
> repository.

Yes, eventually.  It will be hard to make sure that a given resource is not
referenced by any revision anywhere in a project (or across multiple
projects, since Stellation projects sharing the same repo can also
theoretically share resources).  Mark has earlier posts on this topic,
I believe.

It may well be better to effectively do a purge by creating a new repo
containing the desired subset of projects and branches (and associated
resources) from an existing repo, and then archiving the old repo - or
perhaps extracting the inverse subset into a separate archival repo and
deleting the original.

- Jim

--
Jim Wright, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
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