Re: Eric goes to lunch -- a decentralized-development user story

Barry Scott wrote:
>
> I do not think its a good idea to have important subsystems only be
> driven by parsing text output of a program.

The front page of the Subversion page at Tigris directly contradicts you:

> # Parseable output
>
> All output of the Subversion command-line client is carefully designed to be both human readable and automatically parseable; scriptability is a high priority.

WinCVS is an excellent example of making silk purses out of sows ears; CVS had
no other interface so a GUI was written to drive the commandline. I wasn't
saying that this would be the best way to interface with svk, merely that the
fact that svk is only commandline now is in no way relevant to the difficulty of
making a gui for it.

> I know lots of people like Perl, I'm not one of them. Its far to hard to
> maintain and difficult to learn.
> Languages like Python are far better designed.

Both of those statements are value laden and should really be prefixed with "I
believe" since neither of them are objective facts. Your personal opinion is
interesting, but hardly relevant to the discussion, which is how an existing
tool already performs all of the functionality that was requested. What
language that tool is written in is, truly, unimportant. Please try and keep
your personal biases out of the discussion; we don't need a language war here.

I think CLKao would agree that he would be perfectly happy to have all of the
existing functionality in svk transferred into the Subversion core (where it
would be C, not Python). The "design you throw away" need bear no substantial
relation to the eventual package with the same functional capabilities.

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4720 Boston Way
Lanham, MD 20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5747
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