Subversion: Linus and Keywords Substitution - Fortune

Subversion: Linus and Keywords Substitution

Regarding keyword substituion: It turns out that Linus thinks it's a
horrible idea: http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2006/10/9/223932

His argument is that it may destroy binary files.

This is bogus since keyword-substitution is *off* by default. It will occur only for files that were explicitly marked for substitution. For example in subversion:

svn propset svn:keywords "Id Author Revision" *.h *.c

As a substitute (pun intended) for the lack in this feature he gives a hand crafted, build system dependent, manual (i.e: error prone) method.

What a lame excuse.

Author Oron Peled
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