[Monotone-devel] svn_sync / svn_import [Was: nvm.experiment.encapsulation review]

[Lapo Luchini]

Markus Schiltknecht wrote:
> > I wonder is CVS import actually all that important anymore?  Should we
> > rather be concentrating on SVN, git, and mercurial compatibility?
>
> Well, at least to me and to Kelly, is still *is* pretty important.

IMHO it is still important... but OTOH we're kinda missing the "first 
wave of conversion" train, and SVN (thanks to its very-CVS-likeness, and 
the support by sourceforge and other similiar repositories, and the 
GUIs) is gettin' much attention from people that "just want to avoid a 
few CVS weaknesses" and doesn't really "feel the need" for distributed 
vcs (simply because they never tried it, I concur).

But I can't really argue against that: as of *today* SVN is certainly 
the best migration choice, if you have a wide developer-base and if you 
take into account GUIs and integration in developement tools.
SVN has got TortoiseSVN (which is as good as TortoiseCVS) and Subversive 
(which is as integrated into Eclipse as the native CVS support itself 
is; though many people is still using Subclipse, which is far worse).

So, while cvs_import/sync is very important, I think adding support for 
svn_import/sync is more and more important as time passes.

A couple of examples that are very dear to me:
- at my main workplace we use SVN, as it was already in large use when I 
arrived there and given the fact that we are only 3 people committing 
and we only work from the office (i.e. on the same LAN of the SVN 
server) I failed to find "reasons enough" for a switch
- the "repository man" of FreeBSD is advocating for SVN (details here: 
http://wiki.freebsd.org/VCSWhy and, more importantly, he said he would 
actually *implement* it, not only propose it); the main idea being: 
CVS-SVN is the easiest choice right now, and the sooner we have 
changesets/renames/and-so-on the better we could upgrade to some *other* 
vcs in the future

So, for myself, a svn_sync will (probably) be very important in the 
future. And I will start writing one as soon as it become important 
enough vs how much free time I have :-P
(or, maybe, at the summit itself? this reminds me we could probably 
create a paragraph-or-page "code proposals for summit'08")

    Lapo