[Axiom-developer] comment

[daly]

> I could repeat almost word-for-word a similar statement by Tim
> Daly concerning svn. It turns out that I can reproduce both of
> your problems and I discussed how to solve both of them and
> still neither of you are interested. I guess that's progress.

> not.

As I recall the whole Axiom project spent a considerable amount
of effort trying to resolve the SVN problem. You did a great job
trying to set up SVN on axiom-developer (successfully?) and Google
(unsuccessfully). 

I eventually experimented with other systems. You advocated darcs
and mercurial as I remember. I looked at darcs but my investigations,
and I believe your comments, left me with the impression that it is
not ready for a full, large projects. I did not try mercurial.

SVN times out on me and I have to do a checkout+12update cycle to
get a full axiom copy. Checkin takes over half an hour. SVN uses
twice the space of the Axiom distribution. It all feels slow,
ponderous, and heavy. And SVN wedges, demanding I "cleanup", which
never succeeds.

I eventually tried git. Checkout and checkin over the network take
about the same time as a local disk-to-disk copy. It uses only a tiny
amount of additional disk space. I like it so much that I've moved all
of my research work into git and use it for normal work purposes.

So, yes, you did reproduce my SVN problems and you discussed how to
solve my problems. However, SVN itself has problems (slow, unreliable,
and large) which have no solution. The question wasn't "can it be
made to work" but rather "why waste the time and space".

Git is the best technical solution, thus I use git. 
To me, that's progress.

Tim