svn or arch

[Cristian Gafton]

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, Rahul Sundaram wrote:

>> Yes - Cristian Gafton did months of extensive
>> testing to see if either
>> could stand up to the load of internal and external
>> checkins on the
>> scale red hat does with distributions.
>>
>> He found that cvs was the only one to stand up to
>> the load.
>
> Ok thanks for the quick reply. are the results
> available anywhere. It would be nice to let the
> svn/arch developers know about this. I am pretty sure
> they would be interested

Please note - this was happening quite a long time ago as far as the 
developers for those projects are concerned.

The first thing we had to do to enable this CVS repository was to redo the 
way we were handling the source packaging internally. That meant earlier 
this year making a decision about which source code management (SCM) 
platform offered the best mix of features, reliability, low cost of 
transition, performance and political acceptance. I looked at a lot of 
those SCMs.

It all boiled down back to CVS because, while having some major 
shortcomings, which I am sure that the proponents of SVN and/or arch will 
quickly point out, it had a unique quality: everybody knows what is wrong 
with it.

Plus, unlike traditional software projects, the needs for a packages/srpms 
repository are very few and somewhat fixed, so I could not grant bonus 
points for a lot of the more esotheric features of the other SCMs.

That, coupled with reliability and readiness issues of other solutions 
kind of locked us into CVS. I am sure that a lot of the issues I ran into 
are now fixed, but as you all know by now, replacing infrastructure bits 
while keeping the development going takes a lot of time.

It could very well be true that now the others are a better deal - but we 
asked that question back in January-March, we came out with this answer 
and we'll ride this one until it hits another critical point. At which 
point we will evaluate again and we will go through another season of 
pain...

Cristian
-- 
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Cristian Gafton     --     gafton at redhat.com      --     Red Hat, Inc.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT
industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software
industry sector."
     -- Kenneth Brown, President, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution