用户元数据的版本控制

Question

I've got a question that most likely doesn't have a unique and clear answer. In the team we are using the SVN, many of the people are using the git-svn (treating it as a fancy SVN client).

We're storing some project related publications, reports, documents in the repository under let's say trunk/Documents/* . Each of the users creates his own notes, annotations, etc. related to a given document - let's say trunk/Documents/doc1.txt . Thus in the end we've got N users having doc1.txt.metadata .

What are your recommendations for storing this metadata? Branches for each user metadata?

Answer 1

As the files are going to differ by user, the cleanest way I can think of is keeping text files like doc1.txt.metadata.username . Keeping separate branches per user metafile sounds complicated to me, and hard to work with in everyday use.

There would be be the idea of automating this using a pre- and/or post-commit hook, but it is discouraged in the SVN book :

While hook scripts can do almost anything, there is one dimension in which hook script authors should show restraint: do not modify a commit transaction using hook scripts. ... Instead of modifying the transaction, you should simply validate the transaction in the pre-commit hook and reject the commit if it does not meet the desired requirements. As a bonus, your users will learn the value of careful, compliance-minded work habits.

The simplest thing might be to establish doc1.txt.metadata.username as a rule, and to write a pre-commit script that rejects any commits of .metadata files without the current user name as the extension.