Re: Proposal: Subversion Migration

[Gregory John Casamento]

MJ,

--- MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop> wrote:

> Gregory John Casamento <greg_casamento@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Ummm.  This probably just means that he forgot to hit reply-all, a common
> > mistake which I'm sure we've all made.   No need to be snippy. ;)
> 
> At some point, he put discuss-gnustep back into the to-list without
> warning. Pretty rude and nothing to do with reply-all.

It had everything to do with "Reply-all".  In fact his subsequent email
indicated that he did exactly what I thought he did.  See the following quote
from his last email to the list:

"I had intended to post to the list and not you directly but I hit 
 'Reply' instead of 'Reply All' so I just sent the message again; that's 
 hardly dirty or sneaky, but anyway."

There was clearly no intention on his part to be rude.  You shouldn't take it
personally or interpret it as rude, so I think you should just drop it.

> [...]
> > * Actively developed, CVS hasn't seen many releases lately
> 
> Did you check your claim?
>
> CVS's latest releases were on 3 October 2005 (feature development)
> and 28 September 2005 (stable).

Ah.  I admit I didn't check this.   

> By comparison, SVN's latest release was on 25 August 2005 and
> they seem to only have one series releasing at the moment.
>
> > * Versions directories, file meta data, etc.
> > * Handles file renames without the need to remove and re-add a file to the
> > repo.
> > * Atomic commits.  In CVS, if an error occurs during commit, it's likely
> that
> > some changes made it and others didn't.  A bad situation.
> > * Efficient handling of binary files.
> 
> Yes, I agree these have benefits, but they are features common
> to most of the modern version control systems. My point is that
> SVN is not the best of the modern ones and doesn't offer that
> much to gnustep (for example, how many files are moving around?
> Are binary files that much of the repository and do they change
> often enough to be a pain?).

I'm not favoring SVN, I'm simply arguing the benefits and drawbacks of it
versus CVS.  I believe that we should carefully consider all of the
possibilities before making a jump.  SVN is only one candidate.

> The biggest benefits for gnustep are likely to be through
> distributed development - because developers are scattered all
> over the world - and integration with the development tools.

I agree with you here.

> It is relatively easy to migrate out of CVS, but migrating out
> of SVN seemed far less simple, last time I looked.
> 
> > * Parseable output makes scripting easier.
> 
> There are tools which parse CVS output, such as cvs2cl, and
> the formats are fairly stable. There are fewer tools working
> with SVN, as far as I can tell. That's a function of age not
> ease, but there's not much to choose between most version
> control systems.

Well, I never said that it wasn't possible to script cvs, or parse it's output.
 SVN is written with scripting in mind, whereas I am not sure that CVS is.

Later, GJC

Gregory John Casamento 
-- CEO/President Open Logic Corp. (A MD Corp.)
## Maintainer of Gorm (IB Equiv.) for GNUstep.