Re: Subversion, decentralized version control, and the future.

On 6/29/2007 8:06 PM, Karl Fogel wrote:

>> Maybe this is inevitable. Maybe we should just define svn 2.0 as a
>> specification with a test-suite to certify implementations. ;-)
>
> No reason not to spec it out, but of course, users can't run a
> specification -- we have to actually implement it too.
>
> FWIW, I think C is fine. We've had our libraries (string, IO, etc)
> developed for a while now. Full garbage collection would be nice, but
> apr pools are pretty easy to work with. The advantages of Python or
> Java or C# or insert-your-favorite-GC'd-high-level-language-here are
> somewhat overstated. There is a slight development-time cost to using
> C, but I think it's outweighed by the advantages Justin listed. Maybe
> we should move to C++ (Daniel Berlin thinks so, IIRC).

While you find C programmers everywhere, you don't find C programmers
fluent in APR and your own libraries as easily. I myself always had
problems contributing to Subversion core exactly because of this. Just
recompiling everything needed to hack Subversion can take several hours
(and I read in a book somewhere that lowering this barrier can help
getting more contributors -- wait, was that YOUR book? :)).

On the contrary, I was able to start hacking on Mercurial after a few
minutes, with 0 seconds wasted in setting up a build environment.

Don't underestimate this issue. If you're going to rewrite wc, it's a
good time to fix it.

-- 
Giovanni Bajo
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