On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> Everyone participating in the development of Subversion is deeply
> familiar with the inadequacies of CVS. Many of these are trackable
> directly to the fact that CVS is a layer on top of RCS, and therefore
> cannot do anything that cannot be represented in RCS ,v files:
> renames, atomic multi-file change sets, and merge arrows being my
> personal top three.
>
> Your suggestion that everything above and beyond what is implemented
> now at the storage level, be pushed into higher layers, is basically
> equivalent to suggesting that we go back to a design that we already
> know does not work.
Well, on a side note, a friend of mine (who's thoughts on such things I do
respect) was explaining to me how it would be technically possible to
implement something just like BK's "distributed repositories" feature
using just branches. Given the fact that Subversion makes branching
completely trivial, it seems reasonable to say (assuming my friend is
correct) that this _particular feature_ could be implemented as a layer on
Svn, given a bit of syntactic/script/CLI (whatever) sugar.
If people here are interested, I could probably get my friend to summarize
the high-level details.
FWIW, I've already started using Subversion a bit for personal projects
and I _like_ it, and I'm happy to see the developers focusing on the
"replace CVS" goal for 1.0. But I'd also love to see a free software tool
replace BK (in kernel development and elsewhere). I know Tom L has been
incredibly irritating during this thread but I don't want to dismiss
everything he says. I think there is some truth to his point that BK is a
"poison pill" to the FS/OSS world, and the goal of replacing it is very
worthy. I think Subversion can do that, _eventually_, but whether it
takes 45, 90, 121.231 days til 1.0, it will _still_ be a worthy goal after
1.0's release.
So to Tom, chill out, you have some good ideas but you're pissing off a
lot of the people who could help you implement them. The sooner that list
of 100 issues (or so) is gone, the sooner people will be willing to start
thinking about changesets, distributed repositories, and giving Larry
McVoy the smackdown he so richly deserves (this is at least half joking).
And to the Subversion team, go go go! I just about jumped for joy at the
simple act of typing "svn rename ..." the other day, after several years
of CVS pain.
-dave
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Received on Wed Oct 16 01:28:55 2002