Newbie questions...

I'm going to prepare a magazine review about a few Open Source CMS (OpenCM,
Subversion, Katie, Arch, Aegis, etc...) and I have a few questions about
Subversion. For part of these questions I can easily find the answers into
the SV documentation _but_ I would rather like to hear from you (Subversion
developers) your opinion about these topics before laying down my comparative
table. Can any SV developer have a look at these questions and send me his
opinion, either privately or trough the SV list?

Many thanks in advance for your help.

PS: Yes, I realize that most of these features will be available only when
Subversion will be actually released or after that.

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Here are the questions:

1) CVS Compatibility. Is it possible to import or use an existing CVS
repository? How about exporting?

2) Disconnected Operations. Is it possible to checkout a project on a laptop
computer, fly to [your favorite desert island], come back after a few months
and merge your stuff into the main branch without destroing the repository
and without losing any data? (resorting to the developer for solving existing
conflicts is perfectly acceptable).

3) Renaming. Is it possible to rename a file or a directory and still hold
all the information about its history?

4) Atomicity. Sensitive operations are atomic? Can you be sure that nothing
will ever interfere with your commit?

5) Access Control List at the Repository Level. Can you grant a new user the
access to the CMS without being forced to grant him access to the host
computer as well?

6) User Authentication. Can you force the developer to use a public-key-based
authentication for accessing the repository?

7) Data Integrity. Can the system ensure the data integrity even in the event
of a serious system crash or others serious accidents?

8) Data protection. Can the repository be encrypted to ensure its
confidentiality? Is the crypto system an integral part of the CMS or is it
borrowed from the underling OS?

9) Binary files. Can the system actually manage binary files (binary diff and
binary patch)? How?

10) Process Control. Is it possible to enforce the user to perform the
required operations in a given sequence, in a given way or within a given
time window?

11) IDE Integration. Can the CMS be integrated in a IDE? Which one?

12) GUIs. Does the system have any GUI for simplifing the administrative
operations or the day-to-day use?

13) Web Interface. Can the repository be accessed via web? Read-only or
read-write?

14) Maturity Level. What maturity level has reached the system? (planning,
alpha, beta, release, in use, mature...).

15) Remote Access. Can the developer use the CMS through internet?

16) Server Platform. Which platform is required for the server? Linux/Unix?
Windows?

17) Client Platform. For which platforms are available the clients?
Linux/Unix only? Windows as well? Mac OS?

18) Repository Nature. What is used to hold the data? The regular File System
of the host machine? A versioning file system? A special file system? A
database?

19) Licence. Can the system be used for free even in a commercial project?

20 ) User Tracking / Auditing / Logging. Is it always possible to tell who,
when and how has changed a file (and a CMS parameter)?

21) Concurrency. How the system manages the concurrent access to the same
file? Lock-Modify-Unlock? Checkout-Modify-Merge? Can the policy be chosen by
the administrator?

22) Version Recovery. Is it always possible to recover an old version of any
individual object (and of a whole configuration)?

23) Version Tracking. Is it always possible to know (to browse) the whole
history of an individual object (and of a whole configuration)?

24) Dependency Control. Is it always possible to know which components are
required to build up a specific configuration of the program?

25) Configuration Management. Is it possible to manage a group of objects as
a single system? Can a specific configuration be marked (labelled) for a
better identification? Is the labelling required?

26) Notifications. Is it possible to trigger a notification for every
meaningful event that can affect the repository and its content?

27) Notifications 2. How can be delivered a notification to the human user?
E-mail only? Other ways?

28) Notifications 3. How can be delivered a notification to a program?
E-mail? RPC? Others?

29) Branching-Merging. Is it possible to branch in any moment, work for a
while on the branch and merge back without losing any data and without
crashing the system? (resorting to the human judgement for solving the
existing conflicts is perfectly acceptable). Is it possible to merge a branch
with another branch, instead of the original trunk, supposing that the two
branch have a common ancestor?

30) Merging 2. How good is the merging mechanism? Like CVS? Better than CVS?
Worse?

-------------------------------
Alessandro Bottoni
alessandro.bottoni@libero.it

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Received on Mon Jul 29 18:58:19 2002