Brian Behlendorf <brian@collab.net> writes:
> Sorry if this essay (eek!) seems melodramatic. I wish both Stellation and
> OpenCM well, as one would wish any volunteer effort well. I just wish I
> knew why there was a reluctance to combine efforts, especially if it's due
> to constraints we imposed that aren't necessary.
It may not be obvious from Mark Chu-Carroll's announcements, but
Stellation has a significantly different approach to versioning than
Subversion's. For one thing, it versions units smaller than a single
file; I think it does this by having syntactic knowledge of the data
it's versioning. So it "knows" about all the functions in a C file,
for example, and could assemble a new C file out of functions taken
from various revisions, etc.
Well, I could be getting something wrong here (Mark, please correct me
by private mail if so; meanwhile, this disclaimer should be sufficient
to prevent anyone from taking my word as gospel when it comes to
Stellation!).
But anyway, my point is, the reason these two projects aren't
combining efforts is because they're very different, and the gain is
not at all clear at this stage. Yes, their goals do intersect
somewhat, but the non-intersecting space is large and interesting too.
I don't think there's some big missed opportunity here. Could be
wrong, but based on what I've seen, the effort of unifying the
projects would be large, and the gain hard to predict.
(I think the same is true of OpenCM, but that's a guess based on one
download and playing-around with it. It just has different
priorities.)
-K
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Received on Mon Jul 8 06:24:11 2002