Re: lists.gnu.org and savannah.gnu.org (CVS) updates

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Archie,

On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 09:31 -0600, Archie Cobbs wrote:
> Mark Wielaard wrote:
> > subversion is still a bit immature and not widely supported yet (for
> > example on builder.classpath.org we needed to install the latest
> > 1.3.0rc4 to get around some network timeout issues). CVS might be old
> > and clumsy at times, it is much more mature and supported atm. That
> > said, if savannah adds subversion support I would vote for us to switch.
> 
> I think you're information is slightly dated :-) Subversion is quite
> matture. The 1.0 release, which itself was very stable, was released
> almost two years ago. Now they're up to version 1.2.3.
> 
> For example, all of Apache is on a single Subversion server
> and they're up to revision #356264 (including imported CVS commits).
> We've used it at my real job for over a year with zero problems.
> 
> As far as being "supported", not sure what you're referring to.
> Everything I've ever wanted to do with CVS I can do with SVN, plus
> a lot more.

Don't get me wrong I do like subversion. And I used it for multi
megabyte imports of classpath source into different gcc branches. And
most things do work really nicely. And even much smoother then with
CVS. 

But fact is that the first time I needed to use svn instead of cvs it
took twice as long, since it isn't really a 1-to-1 mapping (to be fair,
next time the same task will probably take me half the time). And I did
experience some glitches (which is why we needed version 1.3.0rc4 on
builder), nothing that looses data, but small inconveniences like very
slow or stalled network connections in automated scripts. Or the fact
that you really need to setup an external diff command since the
built-in one is not capable enough. 

With supported I meant that CVS can be expected to be available
everywhere in a really stable version. Subversion isn't there yet. It is
starting to become more standard, but it isn't yet something that is
just installed by default, so for people using multiple diverse
platform/distributions it takes much more time to get a working setup.

Also importing an old CVS repository like all of GCC seems possible now
but there were some small anomalies. So the switch will have to be done
carefully and will take some time to get right and double check.

Lastly working copies take more than twice as much diskspace as with CVS
(I do know that means some operations are much faster, but with large
repositories like classpath it does add up when you have multiple
checkouts).

All this isn't meant as saying we shouldn't adopt subversion when
savannah supports it though. Just to say that it isn't slam-dunk
decission given the diverse background of our hackers. I am still
convinced that if savannah supports it we should switch, but I do want
to let people know there are some (small) downsides.

Cheers,

Mark

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