[Gnu-arch-users] New to list, need advice on naming repositories.

[timbo]

Hi all,

The company I work at is moving off CVS, and most likely onto arch, as I'm
the guy tasked with creating the proposal.

Our main requirements were changesets and parallel development of multiple
new features asynchronously.

I'm also functioning in the build-manager role, and so the ability to pull
in multiple changesets from various archives is important.

The project is fairly large php based web application (~100k lines of our
own code, plus libraries), with ~15 full-time developers.  We will likely
have 3-7 active projects "in-flight" at any given time, ranging from bug
fixes prior to a release, all the way to new core infrastructure for
3,6,9,or maybe even 12 months out.  We also have about 6-8 smaller
independent projects that ship as part of the finished product but are
maintained separately from the main application.  Each project will have ,
1-4 developers, and each developer will be involved in about 3 projects at
any given time.

While there are several FOSS changeset-oriented revision control systems
(monotone, darcs), it seems that tla is the most mature and feels very
"safe" (i.e. no database, simple text files).

I am in the process of defining the processes we would use around arch to
manage these projects and developers.

So far here are the concepts I've come up with:

1. Each existing cvs repository becomes a separate repository in arch.
2. Each project will get it's own repository, branched from the last
release available when the project starts.
3. Each developer will have a separate repository for each project they
work on, branched from the project archive.
4. Project leads will review changesets and star-merge as needed to sync
up the people in the project.  Leads could also create a "tag only"
repository that would expose milestones of the project.
5. Testing group can build the application out of any repository for
testing of that feature.
6. The release manager will create a new version in the main repository,
and pull changesets from the various project repositories to construct a
release candidate which will be tested and released.

Questions:

Am I using too many repositories?
Should each developer have only one repository and keep all their projects
in there?
Does anyone else have experience in converting a fairly large group of
developers over to arch from cvs?
What kind of training did cvs-oriented people need to start using arch?
What is the general state of bazaar compared to tla?

I am convinced that arch can do what we want.  It's a matter of making it
possible for people to shift over without excessive pain.

Thanks,
Tim