Re: switching to SVN ?

[Michael Banck]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 09, 2007 at 10:25:34PM +0200, Thomas Schwinge wrote:
> You may question: ``Who needs five checkouts of the same source code?''
> I do.  I have five of the Hurd's HEAD, fourteen of GNU Mach's
> gnumach-1-branch, four of glibc.  Every one with different patches and
> changes.

Switching away from CVS might remove some of the pain, as you could
maybe keep more changes seperately in one branch without having to worry
too much about conflicts and how to merge/branch etc, dunno.
 
> Another major one.  Ease of creation and merging between different
> branches.  (Both long-lived branches (that are kept in sync with each
> other) and short-lived branches; called topic-branches principle.)  An
> absolute no-brainer with git.  Rather clumsy with cvs.  (Samuel
> explicitly asked _me_ if I could merge changes from gnumach-1-branch into
> his Xen branch.)  I don't know about Subversion, but suspect it's similar
> to cvs.

Not that I have first hand knowledge, but I was under the impression
that subversion took away that kind of pain you and Samuel encountered
during merging, i.e. the bugs/hassles cvs has, not necessarily the
general work-flow issues you might have with it for branching/merging.

> Obviously: using a distributed system brings the advantages of using a
> distributed system, 

That's not so obvious to me.  To me, using subversion brings the
advantage that *everybody can use their own favourite distributed
system* on top of it, because clearly there is no winner in the dvcs
race so far, and it is trivial to use subversion as a base for most of
them.

Plus subversion is quite similar to cvs so there shouldn't be a big
learning curve for anybody who wants to contribute.


Michael