[Axiom-developer] Version numbers and merging improvements

[daly]

> And I hope they will be gone once trunk turns into Gold. Then everything
> is on sourceforge. Who would bother with checking out via CVS. Any
> reasobable programmer has by now heard of SVN and will certainly be able
> to install it on his machine and get the Axiom sources via SVN.

(a) Not all programmers are reasonable (me and linus, for instance)
(b) CVS ships with all known linux distros
(c) Savannah does not use SVN
(d) SVN didn't install cleanly on axiom-developer
(e) The project is widely available in stable "Gold" format

For most of the world Axiom should "just work". No need to install anything.

Sourceforge SVN is ok for developers but most of the world does not
consist of developers.  There is no need to know about SVN at
all. Sourceforge SVN is just a local cul-de-sac. Aside from the fact
that we can see local commits to private source trees it has no other
special function. Indeed it could be argued that exposing private source
trees enables the "cherry-picking" behavior. If these trees were not 
visible then changes would only be available as diff-Naur changesets.
That appears to be a more desireable behavior.


> Why should we bother an invest time in keeping Arch and CVS as mirrors?

You don't need to bother with this. Maintaining Arch, address@hidden and
address@hidden are my concerns.

Cliff's efforts to make tarballs of Gold for various platforms is a 
much needed effort. I don't believe that version numbering is of any
interest outside our little furball of developers but who knows....

Tim