Re: Proposal: Subversion Migration

[Fred Kiefer]

I had tried to stay out of this discussion. Now that the flame level
seems to have dropped, I will join in for one mail.

Helge Hess wrote:
> On 19. Okt 2005, at 02:36 Uhr, Andrew Ruder wrote:
>> Should the sourceware.org folks respond favorably to our hosting of
>> gnustep subversion there, will it be pursued?
> 
> I suppose GNUstep should stick with GNU focused services and  definitely
> not move to a specific vendor (RedHat in this case).  Reasons got stated
> by Adam and I tend to agree.
> 

I, like almost everybody taking part in this discussion, would like to
move on to a more powerful version control system. But I would prefer to
keep GNUstep on savannah. Perhaps we could start lobbying them to get up
to speed with a new version control system. Here I am not fixed on
subversion. What ever other system they decide on would suite me.

> Given the feedback of Richard, Wim, Rogelio the proposal seems to be 
> dropped. The "6 months" timeout mentioned by some seems to be a  rather
> ridiculous "excuse" to me since in this timeframe the systems 
> _definitely_ won't change in any noticable way.
> Apparently the core developers are fine with CVS - which is rather 
> surprising to me, but needs to be accepted.
> 
The available systems may not change to much in that time frame, but the
position of savannah towards them may well change. That's why I support
this idea.

> The primary thing I would have hoped for are branches which might not 
> directly reflect the "regligious GNUstep path", eg branches which 
> support FHS. IMHO this would have been much easier with Svn and 
> definitely won't happen as CVS branches.
> 

Here I can sense some difference. I also like branching, the hard part
is to merge the branches later on again. It is horrible how hard it is
in CVS to move files. But imagine the task of merging back a branch of
GNUstep, where the whole structure of the souce code has changed. I
really prefer small decidated patches. Here I see a big challange for
GNUstep coming up, after we made the switch to a better version control
system. It will force us to introduce even stricter rules or we will end
up with unmergable branches, where everybody has romm to play, but not
to share.
This is not just a theoretical experiment. I am in the process of trying
to merge back code from the myStep project, which did branch off from
GNUstep more than five years ago. As soon as the file hierarchy
structure changes as well merging really gets hard. BTW for this merge I
will also need to reconsider the GNUstep FHS politics, but that's a
separate issue.

Cheers
Fred