Finder labels and Subversion

Alastair Houghton just posted Command line tools for changing and querying the label of a file. He also includes scripts that write those as properties to a subversion repository or apply them from the repository properties... we really need standardized client-side hooks for subversion to make this really useful -- imagine a "checkout-hook" and "pre-checkin-hook" script for stuff like this...

Though at least now I can write a script that marks all my projects as red, which is something I generally do to more easily find them.

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Brian Ray writes: Uli, I listened to you on Late Night Cocoa Podcast archive. Good stuff. BTW, I know those not from the US call svn tag's "label". Although, here you are specifically talking about the special color labels the Finder puts on files to create a color background, and not anything to do with svn. I think this might clear things up for a couple readers. I once thought about trying to save some resource fork information in subversion properties. Do you know if this would work? Yes I still have resource forked files laying around I wish to put in Subversion. *sigh*

Uli Kusterer replies: ★ Well, I'm not from the US, and anyone I know calls 'em tags ... Could you be more specific? Do you mean the UK? India? New Zealand? Australia?

Brian Ray writes: I think in the Netherlands <http://www.freebsd-nl.org/doc/nl/cvs-tags.html> and Germany they refer to tags as labels

Uli Kusterer replies: ★ @Brian: I live in Germany, and haven't used the term labels used in that context here, ever. Since you're linking to a Dutch page, it might just be that the Dutch word for "tag" is "label" and spelled the same as the English word. Considering that English and Dutch share a common heritage, the words may even come from the same Germanic word, but dropped or acquired different additional meanings, who knows. I could definitely see a German explaining tags by saying a tag is essentially "a label on a particular version", i.e. "ein Etikett auf einer Version" or so... but that would be an explanation, not a common term.

na writes: SCC Tools such as PVCS(aka Version Manager) from Merant call them labels and that is a US Company.

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