[Svnmerge] svnmerge and different flavors of sh

[Jim Fulton]

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

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