"Seth de l'Isle" <seth.delisle@ge.com> writes:
> I was wondering if the members of this mailing list could help me determine
> under what time frame and at what cost we could get exclusive locking into a
> stable Subversion release.
>
> I would like to be able to bring approximate answers to the
> following questions back to my company's "decision makers."
>
> 1. How long does it take a competent coder to understand the Subversion code
> base enough to be able to contribute a significant patch?
>
> 2. How many programmer/hours of work would be required to get exlusive lock
> support into the stable version of Subversion?
>
> 3. Are the Subversion project leaders in a position to negotiate for
> sponsorship of this feature?
>
> 4. Are any Subversion contributers in a position to consult for this kind
> of work?
>
> I'm sure everyone is aware of the substantial licensing costs of Subversion's
> commercial competition; I wonder if either a direct financial contribution,
> or a contribution of time of an in-house developer or third party
> contractor to the Subversion project would be competitive with those costs?
Good questions.
The answer is that it's not just a matter of hiring someone for a
certain amount of time. One can't just say "It takes 3 months to get
up to speed enough to write the patch, another 2 months to design it,
and another 2 months to code it up." It's also a matter of remaining
in the development community, being around to see how users react to
the feature, to deal with bugs when they come up, etc. It doesn't
match well with a piece-work/subcontractor methodology (I have some
experiences that corroborate this).
There's no one here in a position to negotiate for sponsorship of the
feature. However, if you can find a Subversion developer willing to
spend time on this for money, that's fine. That might make the
feature get implemented sooner rather than later, but it does not
enable anyone to make any guarantees, since the feature must still be
designed and implemented by a consensus-based process. (See
http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/HACKING for details.)
Of course, you can pay anyone to make any private patch to Subversion
you want. I'm assuming you prefer the functionality to be present in
the public Subversion, so you don't have to maintain a patch, though.
Note that we have made a lot of progress on designing a locking system
already. The effort has stalled for a bit because some other
responsibilities came up for some of the parties involved, but they
will get back to it when those responsibilities are over. I'm pretty
confident that we'll have locking within a year, but not in less than
(say) three months.
For now, I'd say your best options are a) find some sort of
workaround, or b) delay the rollout of Subversion until locking is
closer.
Best,
-Karl
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Received on Wed Aug 25 22:00:02 2004