My name is Peter Westlake, and I work in the Development Systems part of
ARM, looking after builds and source control. I am looking into possible
replacements for CVS, and Subversion seems like a natural candidate. It has
the usual advantages of free software, and it will be familiar to our CVS
users. It also uses one of my favourite algorithms, "shadow paging" (the
"bubble-up" method of updating the repository atomically), and it all seems
very well thought out.
I have some questions. Starting with the easy ones:
About the way revision numbers apply to the whole repository:
- don't they increase incredibly quickly?
- isn't it confusing when a file's revision changes even though it itself
has not?
Then the hard ones:
- what support can Subversion offer for distributed working? We have
offices all over the place, and the network connections are not always as
fast or as reliable as we could wish.
- the main problem area of CVS that Subversion does not (yet) appear to
improve upon is modules. CVS modules are badly broken, in that you have to
hack around in the internal files of the repository to set them up, and the
module structure is not versioned. So if I make a module include another,
and check out the parent module from a date before I did that, I get the
included module. What scope is there for putting a fully versioned module
mechanism into Subversion? I get the impression that it ought not to be
that difficult if approached in the right way. Such an implementation would
have to support recursive operations, e.g. branching a module and all its
sub-modules. Of course, this isn't always what you want, so there would
have to be two ways to define a sub-module: one where the sub-module would
be thought of as "part of" the parent module, and branched with it, and one
where it would be thought of as "referenced by" or "linked to" the parent,
so it would not be branched. Instead, both branches of the parent module
would point to the same sub-module. There is also the orthogonal
distinction of static vs dynamic sub-modules, which corresponds roughly to
using a tag or a branch. If a module contains a static link to another,
then any checkout of the parent module will get the same revision of the
sub-module. With a dynamic link, it gets the tip. If the parent module is
checked out from some time in the past, it would get the revision of the
dynamic module current at that time.
Have I explained all this in a way that makes sense? If so, do you think
that the design of Subversion would permit these functions to be added
cleanly?
Peter.
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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:33 2006