Re: Revision control

[Andrei Barbu]

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 5:37 PM, Michael Banck <mbanck@gmx.net> wrote:
> On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 10:34:41PM +0200, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
>> I like the idea.
>>
>> It would lower the barrier to begin coding on the hurd (I think), and it 
>> would
>> be a good opportunity to clean up the cvs chaos a bit (so newcomers don't get
>> completely lost in the different repositories).
>>
>> Also it has the advantage to remove the central point of failure, which feels
>> very Hurd-like to me: Everyone has a full copy of the repository, and only
>> the reference repository is under central control.
>
> Well, CVS is certainly doomed, but I don't think the above two points
> are strong arguments.  Probably gnumach-1-branch should be moved back to
> HEAD, yes, but otherwise, the CVS looks pretty decent to me (note that
> glibc still manages to use CVS, which is a far bigger project commit and
> code-wise).
>
> Also, a central repo is not much of a SPOF, if Savannah goes down with
> all its backups, we got bigger problems than worrying about the Hurd I
> guess.
>

I agree, the two points aren't the reason why I'm asking about this.
Distributed version control would let people work offline; which is
always a plus. More importantly any modern version control system
makes branches trivial. We already have a few branches, and there was
talk of having one per SoC student. Integrating all of those won't be
fun with cvs. It also makes development easier because I can just pull
patches from people that I am interested in. For example I would like
some /proc support, which another student is implementing, for part of
my project. Doing this with cvs is a nightmare. There's also the fact
that moving to something like git is easy and we don't lose history
doing it. Since it's a rather simple change, aside from the fact that
people would have to learn a new set of commands, which is a few
minutes of work, it seems worthwhile given all the benefits.