[Svnmerge] svnmerge and different flavors of sh

[Jim Fulton]

Blair Zajac wrote:
> Jim Fulton wrote:
> 
>> Blair Zajac wrote:
>>
>>> Jim Fulton wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> FWIW, I'd be happy to contribute toward a Python version of svnerge.
>>>> This should increase portability, performance, and maintainability.
>>>>
>>>> Jim
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Jim,
>>>
>>> That would be great.
>>>
>>> I would just start on it and send it along to the mailing list for 
>>> feedback for eventual inclusion into Subversion's main repository, 
>>> which either I can do.
>>
>>
>>
>> ok
>>
>>> BTW, a good place to check out on writing a Subversion client that 
>>> purely uses the Python bindings and doesn't fork out anything is this 
>>> script, which took a decent amount of work to figure out, as there's 
>>> almost no documentation anywhere, except for pydoc, Subversion's 
>>> include files and Googling the mailing lists:
>>>
>>> http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/contrib/client-side/svn_export_empty_files.py 
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I have 2 reservations about using the Python subversion bindings:
>>
>> 1. As you say: "there's almost no documentation anywhere, except for 
>> pydoc,
>>    Subversion's include files and Googling the mailing lists". :/
>>
>> 2. I doubt that subversion-python is widely installed.  For example, It's
>>    not included in the online binaries for Fedora:
>>
>>    http://dag.wieers.com/packages/subversion/
>>
>>    (It also doesn't seem to be available in the standard FC1 yum
>>    repository. Yes, I need to upgrade from FC1. :)
>>
>> I'm inclined to shell out for subversion operations.  We can, at least,
>> avoid shelling out for string operations. :)
>>
>> I'll isolate the subversion access in such a way that a more direct
>> approach can be plugged in if desired.
>>
>> (BTW, as I mentioned before I doubt this will have much speed benefit,
>> except in the case of local repositories, as I think most time
>> will be taken doing network I/O.)
>>
>> Jim
>>
> 
> Well, in our open source world, the person who does the work gets to say 
> how it gets done :)

:)

I have a very open mind on the subject.  I also am not particularly
fond, in general, of shelling out.

> I don't have any strong feelings with the bindings, but there is a 
> perception in the Subversion group that using the bindings is better 
> than shelling out.  Also, they've received a large amount of work, such 
> as one of the Google Summer of Code projects was to improve the Python 
> bindings, so I wouldn't like to see new projects use shells when 
> bindings can be used.

Interesting.  Too bad they missed the most important opportunity
for improvement -- documentation. :)

I wonder why the python bindings aren't more widely distributed.

> In this case, as we're not doing much or pulling information from the 
> repository that is hard to get via a shell, so we could go either way.

Yup.

Jim

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