on moving tags

[John Yates]

On  May 17 2005, Martin Pool wrote:

> On the whole though, I think I'd encourage people to have a branch
> called "stable" and merge in to that, rather than having a tag that
> gets moved all the time.  Tags are a point in time and should be moved
> basically only when you make a mistake; code that develops and changes
> should be on a branch.

I understand the bzr desire to ease adoption by reusing familiar terms
and concepts.  Hence the vocabulary of tags and branches.  These though
are not the most felicitous terms.  Properly suggestive terms can go a
long way to encouraging internalization of proper models and fostering
of desired usage.  I find "snapshot name" better captures the notion of
a tag and its intended role.  Similarly I am partial to the "line of
descent" phrase as opposed to "branch".

I don't seriously expect bzr to embrace such terminology.  But it could
make an effort to use the term "tag" only to refer to revision tags.  If
bzr can expunge the any use of "tag" to refer to naming a branch/LOD it
will have made a significant contribution to the VC world.

At the very least I hope that bzr eschews within its CLI CVS's
conflation
of "branch tags" and "revision tags".

/john