"Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> writes:
> Eric S. Raymond here. Some of you know me of old.
Welcome to Subversion!
> I've signed up because I want to help head BitKeeper off at the pass.
> McVoy's design looks good but his license is insidious. Having
> surveyed the alternatives, (a) the CVS codebase is too brittle, (b)
> PRCS doesn't handle distributed development well enough, and (c) Aegis
> may be a fundamentally better design than any CVS workalike, but
> prospects of migrating the world to it from CVS seem dim. That's my
> present evaluation, anyway.
Agree about the Bitkeeper thing. Excellent technology, unacceptable
license. Sigh. :-(
> Anyway. Since I signed up, I've seen a lot of relatively low-level
> conversation about implementation. What's happening architecturally?
> How many months do you think you are from being able to field a
> drop-in CVS replacement? Are there migration tools? The design
> document is out of date, which is a bad sign -- is anyone responsible
> for fixing that.
Why is the design document being out of date a bad sign? It just
means we're all busy coding :-). (It's actually not all that out of
date, but yeah, one does have to read the header files right now to
know what's really going on). No one has volunteered their time to
keep the design document 100% up-to-date as we code, and the paid
full-timers, myself included, have decided to update it only
infrequently until the code stabilizes.
Fortunately, developers seem to be able to figure out what's going on
anyway.
We're aiming to have basic commits and updates happening over the
network by April 1. Having announced and then bled over milestone
dates in the past, I'm a bit shy now about saying them on the list,
especially when everyone's coding as fast as they can anyway. :-) But
April 1st is pretty much our big day, and at this rate of progress I
think we'll make it.
Note that "basic commits and updates" does not mean a drop-in CVS
replacement. A lot of polishing and testing will have to happen
before that, including completion of the CVS->SVN repository
conversion program. End of May or mid-June would be more like it.
You can help make it happen faster. :-) (You knew I was going to say
that, didn't you?)
> (One way I *can* help directly is with document editing. I'm pretty
> good with English, and it's the kind of task that can be done in small
> pieces between coding runs.)
Wow, that would be great. Any time you could spare for the docs would
be most welcome. Of course, the more familiar you are with the state
of the code the better, but whatever you can spare would help. It's
not that we don't think the docs are important, it's just a matter of
where it's most useful for people to allocate their time right now.
Best,
-Karl
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:23 2006