Re: [Nmh-workers] gnu arch revision control system

[mlh]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 10:27:40PM -0700, Bill Wohler wrote:
> Chad Walstrom <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > address@hidden wrote:
> > > Has anyone had a look at the gnu-arch revision control system?  
> > 
> > Currently, I'm using it for all of my Debian packages.  I'm planning on
> > migrating my personal GNATS development to it, and synchronizing with
> > the savannah CVS repository.
> > 
> > It's a paradigm shift from classic CVS management -- the commands are
> > not really one-for-one with CVS --  but I think it's worth it.
> 
> Do you know how it compares to Subversion or p4? What is its maturity?

It's quite mature and is being actively developed.  And that's not
likely to change as some of the main developers are employed to do
just that.  This is rare for gpl code.

> I've recently started using Subversion at work and like it a lot. It's
> very much like p4, but better. It's very similar to CVS, except that you
> can move and copy files and directories with ease and with preservation
> of history; you can perform a lot of operations directly on the
> repository with URLs. Because operations are atomic and a single log
> message applies to a group of files,


Yeah I like subversion too, but as Chad wrote, arch is quite a paradigm
shift.  In a nutshell Subversion's design is that revision control is a series 
of trees.
Arch's design is that revision control is a base tree + series of changesets.
But see the comparison's linked to on both the subversion.tigris.org
and wiki.gnuarch.org.  The comparison on tigris.org is a bit generous to
arch in some ways, but is quite unfair in that it doesn't mention the
major benefit of arch:  the distributed nature and relative ease of merging
between branches.

> I've found that the ChangeLog has
> become obsolete. A "svn log" on the root directory provides the same
> information.

Arch provides automatic Changelog generation.

> But this is all a bit off-topic since we're sort of limited to what
> Savannah provides.

That may change.  In the meantime, sourcecontrol.net will mirror your
archives for you.   Also, people are working on cvs/svn <-> arch
software.  (Though afaik fully bidirectional synchronisation is
not possible because arch holds information that svn does not)

Matt