Re[2]: [lmi] Converting...to svn? [Was: Savannah status]

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:39:44 +0200 Vaclav Slavik <address@hidden> wrote:

VS> On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 00:26 +0000, Greg Chicares wrote:
VS> > I can easily see several clear advantages of moving from cvs to svn.
VS> > But, although I've spent a few hours here and there reading about
VS> > DVCSs, I've never noticed any reason why they'd be better for lmi.
VS> > What am I missing?
VS> 
VS> DVCS helps when changes propagate to upstream repository slowly or
VS> aren't going to be accepted at all.

 Hello,

 I wrote that I'd be glad to reply to the question above myself but Vaclav
did it perfectly well already and I don't have much else to say: DVCS
indeed simplifies life a lot when you want to maintain a separate branch
from the main/upstream one and our work on LMI has been helped a lot by
setting up this local bzr mirror.

 Finally I'd just like to add that I've personally switched all our own
internal projects to hg some time ago (hg and bzr are very close, I chose
hg because of subjective preference) and am very glad I did: it does all
svn do but faster, simpler and provides a few addition commands (rollback,
record, bisect, find feature in log) which could be implemented by svn too
but are not present in it currently. It also allows to easily backup/copy
the repository (just push it somewhere) and to work offline/remotely which
can sometimes be very useful.

VS> On the other hand, using Subversion for the central repository has an
VS> advantage for DVCS users too: it's the common ground that DVCSs tend to
VS> support and so you are free to use your favorite DVCS tool instead of
VS> having to use whatever the upstream choose.

 This is a good point as well. While tailor does work for cvs->bzr
conversion, it's a hack and has already broken down a couple of times, with
svn things are much simpler and it's indeed "natively" supported by all 3
main DVCS (albeit hg is slightly behind here but knowing that one of the
main svn developers works on hgsubversion I have high hopes for the future).

 Regards,
VZ