Re: Self-introduction

"Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> writes:

> Eric S. Raymond here. Some of you know me of old.

Great to have you.

> 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.

We agree. If Subversion is good (or threatening) enough to make Larry
open up his license, then the community wins either way. :)

> Anyway. Since I signed up, I've seen a lot of relatively low-level
> conversation about implementation. What's happening
> architecturally?

The project is maturing very quickly, actually. Collabnet is paying
three full-time developers (me, Karl, Mike), plus we have several
excellent, active volunteers. Redhat has donated Jim Blandy, who is
the primary designer of the svn filesystem, and we also have Greg
Stein (a.k.a. "Mr. WebDAV") writing our network layer.

The client side is somewhat testable, though not yet complete. It's
currently tinkering with working-copy updates and commits via XML.

All our effort has been in the versioned filesystem lately; our
immediate goal is get a rudimentary implentation running and then
connect it to our client-side.

> 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 document is out of date, which is a bad sign -- is anyone responsible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.

As Karl says, we *have* been super-busy coding; we fully intend to
update all docs when we get closer to a release. In a sense, though,
I suspect we're all happy maintaining a low profile. The last thing
we need right now is to be slashdotted; once we have something usable,
it will be easier to handle an onslaught of cooks. :)
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:23 2006