Re: git copies of cvs modules available

[Curt Sampson <cjs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On 2009-11-07 12:05 -0500 (Sat), Greg A. Woods wrote:

> Some CVS branching support can be more painful to use in some ways than
> it maybe could be if it were improved, but IMO SVN doesn't improve those
> things in the much better way something like Hg or Git would do.

In my experience, it does. I've never seen a "simple" wrapper script
that makes branching as simple as it is in svn, and in fact I've never
seen a simple wrapper script for branching at all. Merging is also
significantly easier in SVN, though not as easy as in git.

All that aside, there is no way, on any reasonably large repository,
even on an SSD drive, to make CVS branch operations work at any
significant fraction of the speed of svn branch operations.

And, users aside, CVS has much higher admin costs, particularly when
it comes to dealing with repositories that get themselves into odd or
invalid states. Perhaps part of our disagreement is that, in the case of
NetBSD, you don't have to deal with the administrative side of using the
repo.

Note that I'm certainly not saying that, if we want eventually to move
to a git- or Hg-like system, it's worth doing an intermediate upgrade to
Subversion.

> SVN does absolutely nothing for me, especially as a 3rd-party developer,
> but make everything much slower and _far_ more complicated.

You may want to have a look at svk; that improved several areas of
Subversion use for non-committers for me. Also, making Subversion repos
available by rsync worked significantly better for me than CVSup did.

> I did try to use "git svn" as an attempt to try to get the best from the
> SVN repo without having to use SVN daily, but as the manual page says:
> "The initial git-svn clone can be quite time-consuming (especially for
> large Subversion repositories)."  Perhaps it'll be better (i.e. usable)
> now that the initial nearly 24-hr clone operation is done.

I've used git svn for this sort of thing, and found it worked quite
well, aside from initial clone speed, for both svn committers and
non-committers alike.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs%starling-software.com@localhost>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
                   http://www.starling-software.com