[svk-users] push /pull problem

[David Kaufman]

Hi Jesse,

"Jesse Vincent" <jesse at bestpractical.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 12, 2008, at 7:52 PM, David Morton wrote:
> > I have mirrored a remote repo, and then checked out a branch from the
> > mirror:
> > [snip]
> > When I push a set of changes, it [...]
> > tries to merge https://www.maiamailguard.com/svn/trunk into my
> > branches/1.0 path.  Did I do something wrong?
> >
>
> Likely, you want to
>
> svk cp //mirrors/maia/branches/1.0 //local/maia-1.0
>
> and then work on the local branch. What you've been doing up to now is
> working on a direct checkout of the mirrored branch. In the svk world
> "mirrored" branches should be exact clones of the remote trees which
> they mirror. So any change should be applied to the remote tree first
> and then copied down.
>
> "svk help intro" should describe the "right" workflow.
>
> Does that make sense?

It didn't make sense for me, either.  The "right" workflow seems wrong to 
me.  Whether I've checked out the entire repo (trunk, branches, tags and 
all) or I've checked out just a particular branch, it's alarming and 
surprising to me as a user that, when I try checking my changes in, onto a 
branch, svk tries to merge the trunk to the branch...  I see is as a bug. 
pull-ing from, and push-ing to, a branch should only read data from, or 
apply changes to that branch, regardless of whether the trunk is local or 
remote... but maybe i just need a "pull-branch" command or something to 
DWIM.

I know svk can do a lot more than svn but (I think) I'm a member of a large 
class of users who just want to use svk to mirror our work svn repos 
locally (when we go home), to be able to do "offline" commits (even to 
branches, and expect those commits to stay on those branches), and 
essentially time-shift all our work back to the real world after we've come 
down off the mountain with our laptops, and need to sync up with the real 
world after regaining net access.

To do my work I often need to switch branches while offline to, say, fix a 
bug on the trunk and then backport the fix to a previously released 
version, and commit it to the released version' bug-fixes branch.  svk does 
not support me in this.  I'd have to mirror each branch of the remote repo 
*separately* (keeping track of newly branches myself) just to "hide their 
lineage" from svk so it doesn't try to pull the trunk into my branch when i 
pull, or worse, merge my branch back up to trunk when I commit to them, 
then later try to push them to the remote branch.

I've stopped using svk long ago over this very issue, having realized that 
mine is just a non-supported use case, but I like to read the list and post 
these little me-too's whenever someone re-reports this as a bug.   It's 
clear from the replies from the dev team that you guys don't acknowledge 
the behavior we're seeing as a problem, but to us it is, if not a bug, 
certainly a missing (and misunderstood!) feature.  I haven't heard from 
anyone (and doubt I ever will) who thinks of it as a *feature* that when 
they commit to a checkout of branch and (only if the local mirror also 
contains the trunk) use push or pull to (intentionally, mind you) trigger a 
merge of the remote branch to the remote trunk.  But hey, there might be 
people who want to do this.  All I'm saying is I haven't heard from them, 
while i keep hearing from users like me who expect push or pull to be 
useful (in a non-catastrophic sense) and do the same thing whether the 
local mirror is of just a single branch, or the who remote repository.

We assume that what we want to do will 'just work', and when it doesn't, it 
fails in this spectacularly surprising way.  I guess you guys, who've done 
the awesomely wonderful job of *creating* svk, simply don't use svk this 
way and can't understand why our minority of users would ever try to do 
such a thing, and wonder why the oft-cited workaround is completely 
unhelpful to us and that's why this bug is always dismissed as user error.

That's disappointing, but I'm still listening, and waiting to see if any 
one ever decides to "fix" it (if it is a bug in push/pull) or if, more 
likely (it is a missing feature) and add a new set of svk $verbs that do 
what we need, which is: "*just* move our local branch changes to the remote 
branch" and "*just* move remote branch changes to our local branch" 
(without merging any branches to or from the trunk, please -- thank you), 
so I can jump back into using svk :-)

Thanks for listening!

-dave