[Fwd: Re: Subversion uptake in OSS project]

Matthew said I could forward this, and it did seem to contain some
interesting data. It's interesting to note that the level of arch
advocacy actually drives some people away from trying it out, although I
assume it also has its intended effect some of the time.

>From a technical perspective, it's also interesting that a site having a
series of "Cannot allocate memory" BDB failures had Apache and svn
compiled against two different versions of BDB. I wonder if that's a
common pattern.

attached mail follows:

Greg,

Caught your message on the svn mailing list archives. I have no
intention of subscribing to yet another list, but thought I'd pass on a
couple of comments regarding LFS. Feel free to forward them to the
list if you feel it's appropriate.

> * LFS: LFS initially discussed conversion to SVN in March. A Bitkeeper
> advocate piped up, but several people did not like the Bitmover
> license.

Indeed, the Bitmover license didn't strike me as being a
particularly Good Thing.

> There appeared to be no strong Arch advocate within the project.

Nor did anyone have the time and/or inclination to perform any kind of
trials of it. Whilst I am sure it is a very good product, the level of
evangelism/fanboy type ranting about it kind of put me off. svn would
appear to be letting the product speak for itself!

> In May, they announced a project to evaluate SCM systems; the mailing
> list for this project(lfs-scm-testing) appears to be defunct, so I
> can't see how it went.

Unfortunately, it never went anywhere. Real Life got in the way
again. As noone had compelling reasons to move to anything other
than svn then that's what I plumped for. Our previous reliance on CVS
was also a large factor in choosing svn.

> Cheap branches appeared to be a big motivator.

Indeed. We have recently adopted a new development model which places a
large need on easily (and cheaply) creating branches.

> In June, they converted the LFS Book sources(their main project). They
> initially had BDB permissions problems, but appear to have solved
> them.

What can I say? PEBKAC? Everything had a umask of 002 apart from
viewcvs :)

> In August, they've been encountering a lot of "Cannot allocate
> memory" BDB issues, and are planning to switch to FSFS after 1.1 comes
> out.

Jostein got in touch with me to try and get to the bottom of this.
We've still not figured out exactly what was wrong, but it seems to be
behaving itself at the moment. I don't think having Apache and svn
linked against different DB versions helped though! Quite why it
decided to throw a fit now I'm not quite sure.

Thanks for everyone's hard work on svn, it's (largely) a pleasure to
use.

Best regards,

Matt.

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Received on Mon Aug 16 18:20:14 2004