Selective read access [LWN.net]

Selective read access

Posted Apr 4, 2010 7:05 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: A proposed Subversion vision and roadmap by engla
Parent article: A proposed Subversion vision and roadmap

This is simple. Create separate repositories.

Granted that linking the stuff together via submodules could be easier, but then setting up a SVN repo to do the path-based stuff isn't exactly child's play either.

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Selective read access

Posted Apr 4, 2010 7:36 UTC (Sun) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]

> This is simple. Create separate repositories.

It's not the same thing. When you have just one repository, a lot of things are simpler, like e.g. tagging, browsing history etc. When you have multiple repositories, you have to repeat each operation for each of them. Or, imagine e.g. you had your repository for some time, and then suddenly you need to grant read/write access to just a part of it to someone. With svn, this is simple. With git, well, impossible.

> setting up a SVN repo to do the path-based stuff isn't exactly child's play either

I disagree. Actually, it is.

p.s. I don't understand the need to defend GIT. Yes, it's awesome, and no, it's not universal. Why not just accept that?

Selective read access

Posted Apr 4, 2010 8:30 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

I'm not exactly defending git. I just happen to like it better than the other DVCSes.

My real rationale for writing here is that I _really_ dislike non-distributed VC systems, for the simple reason that I can't do my own version-controlled changes without either asking for commit access or re-importing the stuff into my own VCS. "git svn" to the rescue

Granted that giving partial r/w access to somebody after the fact may not be particularly easy with git, but give me a few hours and I'll write a script to convert a subtree into a git submodule, with a copy of the relevant part of the commit history. Problem (mostly) solved.