[Monotone-devel] Re: [HACKERS] SCMS question

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hi,

[ I've CCed the monotone-devel list, as I'm sure those people are 
interested, too. ]

Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:
> Beside that - are all of the currently supported Platforms officially 
> supported by the proposed SCMSes ?

I can only speak for monotone. We have (had) buildbots for x86 (linux, 
netbsd, freebsd, win32), amd64 (linux), ppc (osx) and one sparc (osol). 
So far all gcc compiled, AFAIK.

We are very interested in increasing portability of monotone. If you 
could give me (or other monotone devels) ssh access to some of the more 
obscure boxes, that would help a lot. Please contact me privately.

> most of the issues with CVS in that regard have already been worked 
> around (and are therefore "solved").

Huh? How do you guarantee the correctness of a local checkout? At best, 
you can check an md5 sum of a tar archive, but CVS itself does almost no 
integrity checking. Does the buildfarm code check somehow? Against what? 
(Note that we've already had quite some disk failures uncovered by 
monotone, which does extensive integrity checking. But I'm sure database 
people know how important that is, don't you?)

Or quickly test experimental patches? Is that solved?

Or merging between branches, to add another major annoyance of CVS (and 
subversion, for that matter).

I currently fetch the whole PostgreSQL repository via cvsup and then 
import it into monotone to be able to do serious work. Of course that's 
possible, and you can work around all the other limitations of CVS 
somehow, but it's annoying.

> But I agree that for developers especially those that are doing large 
> patches over a long period of time might gain something from another 
> SCMS, but it is not really clear what that SCMS should be or if it 
> warrants the imho enormous switching costs (and the potential disruption 
>  in development until that switch is done which might take days if not 
> weeks).

I certainly agree that switching to another VCS is a major undertaking. 
And I'm working on easing migration to monotone. And I'll quite 
certainly try again to convince you again, *at some point in the 
future*. I would not vote for switching the PostgreSQL repository to 
monotone, yet. (As if I had a vote...;-) )

Regards

Markus