Re: Re: Maintaining 'stable' and 'development' versionsof a repository (hopeless newbie question)

| No-one has suggested that the VCS prevent the code from being broken.
| This particular issue is about the reproducability of the source base
| itself, whether it is broken or not.

 Then I'm not sure I understand the objection to extracting changesets
from their nominal dependencies. My understanding was that it was
forbidden exactly because of that: further changesets were held
to depend on past changesets, and allowing them to be pulled into
another line of development (or a separate repository) without those
dependencies would break the codebase.

 As long as the existing history is immutable, the repository state
is fully recoverable at any point even in the face of pulling changes
back and forth outside of their context. (This assumes that you have
saved all repositories, but that's a generic problem not made worse by
allowing no-context changeset pulls.)

 I suppose that this assumes that no-context pulls will get updated
timestamps (or other appropriate identifiers), so they can never be
mistaken for the same change in its original context. (I tend to think
of a changeset's context as part of it, so the same patch/change in two
different contexts will get different changeset identifiers.)

        - cks