[svn.haxx.se] · SVN Dev · SVN Users · SVN Org · TSVN Dev · TSVN Users · Subclipse Dev · Subclipse Users · this month's index

Thoughts on user issues and how to attract the CVS user base...

From: Tony Mee <A.J.Mee_at_ncl.ac.uk>
Date: 2003-03-11 18:48:05 CET

Firstly a not so short intro...

I come from a slightly different community to that of the Sorceforge or
other open source communities, thought some overlap exists. My
interests are academic and I develop code for research in astrophysics
and mathematics.

CVS is (slowly) being picked up by groups as they realise that it is
very useful in local/global collaborative projects or even just version
controlling your own work, which may be picked up by somebody else
later. The academic research world is perculiar in that it has been
managing global collaboration for a very long time (i.e. longer than the
commercial world). Collaboration it is considered by many to be that
which describes the academic world.

Uses of CVS
-----------
1) Developing software codes (D'oh)
2) Histories of runs of numerical models
   (eg. run parameters and outputed time series)
3) Writing papers (it is quite efficient when writing in text based
   languages such as LaTeX, with postscript figures)
4) Sharing libraries (more static than active codes) of functions,
   visualisation routines, configurations for numerous languages and
   applications
5) Maintaining web sites

Why CVS?... It's free and it's the academic world.

Some of the security features are used to allow particular people access
to current projects but generally is is only the very basic functions of
cvs we tend to use. Many users are primarily mathematicians and
computer ops second so co, commit, update, add, remove, diff are almost
all that is ever used. Branching and tagging appear too 'complex' for
most!

-------------------------

Anyway, I am in the position of trying to encourage various people in
our department to use version management as many of our international
collaborators do. I have taken some time to consider SVN and come up
with a couple of difficulties of which I would like to make you aware:

 1) Many of our users (students esp.) do not have vast amounts of disk
    space, as your disk space vs. network bandwidth. Quotas are
    generally tight in academic institutes unless good reasons
    are given. Trying to persuade them to keep two copies of everthing
    they check out is almost impossible, especially when they really
    only wanted to check out a read-only copy to peruse!
    Further we've all got network bandwidth coming out of our ears :-)

 2) CVS is capable of having 'local' repositories. i.e. even if you
    don't have server you can wack in a directory, cvs init it and
    use it for version control / internal collaboration. SVN can't
    do this... can it? Local repositories really are useful, especially
    in situations where a code may have many developer chronologically
    though one a poor postdoc and his supervisor at any one time. A
    local repository remains an easily passable parcel, but one can
    still grep the cvs log to find out when/why something changed!
    (I know, I don't love this either, but it really is how people work)

 3) One of the great advantages of CVS is when you develop and test
    locally then run codes on a super computer... Since you're working
    in CVS one can simply point the CVS at your repository (e.g. here
    in Newcastle) check out the code on the super computer and
    compile it. Unfortunately I have yet to found a super computer
    with Subversion installed, hopefully this will come with time and a
    little. Is it in any major distributions yet?

tOnY

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Tue Mar 11 18:50:06 2003

This is an archived mail posted to the Subversion Dev mailing list.

This site is subject to the Apache Privacy Policy and the Apache Public Forum Archive Policy.