Emacs support for Subversion is about to get good

I am in the throes of rewriting Emacs VC mode. I was its original
author 15 years ago, and am thus responsible for the architectural
weakness that has made decent Subversion support effectively
impossible (though in my defense I will note that the architecture was
a good fit to the file-oriented VCSes of the time). I had been
avoiding this task for years because VC had accreted into an ugly pile
of hacks that I feared to touch, but a pre-Emacs-22 cleanup left it in
good shape to be rebuilt.

The main objective of the rewrite has been to teach VC mode to think
in terms of operations on filesets rather than operations on
individual files. This enables it to use back ends that know about
operations on groups of files and thus, implicitly, changesets.

I achieved this objective a few hours ago with the first successful
checkout/checkin of a fileset. A bit more debugging remains to be
done, but I expect to have a finished result within days. The code
will enter Emacs CVS shortly; a branch has already been created for it.

The most immediate result of the rewrite will be real support for
Subversion. More generally, the rewrite will make it easy to write
back ends for 3rd-generation VCSes like Mercurial, git,
monotone, and bzr. The Subversion mode will ship with Emacs,
very likely in the next point release.

Subversion devs with a particular interest in this mode will be
welcome to join the small test group that Stefan Monnier (the lead
Emacs maintainer) and I are putting together. Inquire by reply email
for details.

-- 
		Eric S. Raymond
The price of liberty is, always has been, and always will be blood.  The person
who is not willing to die for his liberty has already lost it to the first
scoundrel who is willing to risk dying to violate that person's liberty.  Are
you free? 	-- Andrew Ford
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org