[svlug] Preventing a Revision Control Flamewar

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bill Ward (bill at wards.net):

> What's the difference between mv and rename?  Isn't a rename just a mv
> within the same directory?

"svn rename" is, these days, yet another alias for "svn move".  

The method to implement "svn move" used to be broken as I described, denials
notwithstanding.  It looks as if this mid-2007 mostly patched the breakage
that two posters to this mailing list recently denied ever having existed:
http://www.orcaware.com/pipermail/svnmerge/2007-May/000913.html

It remains a non-atomic operation, is (IMO) a pretty gruesome hack, and
is something the developers really should fix.

(Mr. Miller, of this mailing list, has recently opined that saying "you
should be doing X" is coercive, and is thus "no longer an opinion, and
no longer okay".  Somehow, I can live with that.)

As a minor aside, svn has seemed to gradually escape most of the malign
effects of Java factory-programmer mentality that were so apparent in
early days:  Performance has improved, featuritis has been slightly
pruned, and the dependency tree curtailed markedly.  However, one sign
of its Java mentality heritage persists unchanged:  lack of manpages.