New VCS Choice; SCM SIG

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 08:25 -0500, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 January 2007 01:44, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > What I find arguable/questionable in FE's CVS-repos, is the way
> > "FE-branches" have been implemented into it. They are implemented as
> > separate directories instead of CVS-branches. If real CVS-branches had
> > been used several details would have been much easier.
> >
> > In the early days of FE, I had been told the reason for this design
> > decision had been AVCs, because CVS storing branches in files would
> > prevent AVCs to be applicable.
> 
> Way back when, the dist-cvs method did use actual cvs branches, however the 
> workflow was not easy to apply changes across all branches.  And to some 
> extent having actual directories made life a bit easier for many things.  
> Now, directories COULD be implemented at the same time as cvs branches, just 
> a little extra work on the tool side when bringing them down.  But here we 
> are, and most of us feel that it would be better to move to a new SCM with 
> new possibilities rather than put significant effort into CVS.
Well, from a user perspective things look a bit different:

CVS has a long history, probably everybody has his own record of
experiences with it, probably everybody knows about the weaknesses of
CVS => Everybody is bashing on it.

IMO, svn is heading along the same lane. Initially it had not been much
more but a "weak promise", then it had been pushed/hyped, now people are
about to move away from it. To me personally, gcc having moved from CVS
to svn, gave me sufficient reasons to hate it and not to consider it
anymore for my own work :(

Now, dist-hg, git, bazaar seem to be on high on the list of personal
preferences for some "leading RH people", for reasons only partially
known to me.

Please don't forget that these still qualify as exotic and rarely used
tools, which have had comparable little exposure, and therefore probably
suffer from a lot of bugs and unknowns. Also, don't forget that FE is
supposed to be easily usable by many people. IMO, it would qualify as a
fault to switch to using something "exotic".

So, all in all, you should better make all these VCS stuff entirely
transparent (Implement applications around it), or you'd better off
using something standardized, ... which ATM, would reduce the choice to
svn or CVS.

Ralf