Re: Moving wip to Subversion

[Douglas Wade Needham <cinnion%ka8zrt.com@localhost>]

I agree.  Every time I have dealt with others wanting to move some
project or another to SVN, I ask the same questions...Why?  What does
it fix?  What does it gain us?  etc.  In every case, once we cut
through the bugs which have been fixed and through issues which can be
fixed with training (either to teach them how to do something, or not
to do what I have referred to as "Doctor! Doctor!" items), I have had
these same users fall back to the "Well...Ummmmmm... project XYZ is
using SVN!".  Well, at that point, I generally find myself having to
switch gears for a different sort of battle.  First, I ask them what
they would think if that project deemed that all coding should be done
with just two fingers, since so many typos occur when fingers press
the keys out of order?  Or that all coding should be done in assembly,
or BASIC, COBOL or some other language.  Or that before coding starts,
a hammer should be liberally applied to the left thumb.  Then, I go on
to point out that chasing the latest fad does nothing more than waste
time.  With web apps, it is Java, and many sites have gone through
learning curves to do what can just as easily be done with plain HTML
and perhaps some JavaScript for client-side things like validation.
In this case, we are dealing with source code revision control, and
SVN seems to be the current "cool" solution in that arena.

I cannot, and I will not say that CVS is perfect, or that SVN does not
fix some of the defects which CVS has.  Indeed, I wish CVS had the
ability to have a local repository which essentially stored branches
off of another repository, and I know other problems/limitations
exist.  But SVN has its own problems and limitations, such as the
diskspace issue.  Indeed, last summer, before my father took a fall
which has resulted in his now living in an assisted living facility, I
was looking at SVN in some detail to see if there was anything which
was worth the hits I would take in disk space, performance, etc., and
found nothing.

In addition, we must realize, as has already been pointed out, that
pkgsrc has, as one of its major goals, the support for NetBSD.  And
I do not see either of these moving away from cvs at any point in the
foreseeable future.  This might change, but probably not in the next
couple of years.

Besides, for 99.999% of the stuff we do, CVS is not broken, even for
NetBSD and pkgsrc.  And the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't try
to fix it.  Because, if you do, you may just find that you have broken
something else.  One such item would be my pkgsrc tree, which has
portions of it grafted on from various other repositories, such as
pkgsrc-wip, my own stuff, and the stuff for a NPO for which I head up
the IT effort.

So like several others seem to be saying, I would say that unless
someone could come up with very compelling reasons to move to SVN, my
response will be to just say NO.

Have fun,

- Doug

Quoting kaffe (riccardo%kaffe.org@localhost):
> Hello,
> 
> On Sunday, March 12, 2006, at 11:37  AM, Pippijn van Steenhoven wrote:
> >
> >beta-testers on sourceforge, as that article indicates, so I 
> >personally see
> >no reason not to move. Comments would be appreciated.
> >
> 
> personally I see no reason to move. CVS works fine, why change? Just 
> because it is cool & in and others do it? If we really need some svn 
> feature then we can this discuss this.
> Also wip integrates inside pkgsrc which is in CVS.
> 
> COnsider furthermore that svn just takes up a lot more diskspace (to 
> enable you to do off-line diffs). I find that useless in case of wip 
> but also... it is a waste of diskspace, I imagine only the grief if 
> even pkgsrc switched. For people with netbsd on a second partition or 
> on a laptop like me it would be a disadvantage.
> 
> Cheers,
>    Riccardo

-- 
Douglas Wade Needham - KA8ZRT        UN*X Consultant & UW/BSD kernel programmer
Email:  cinnion @ ka8zrt . com       http://cinnion.ka8zrt.com
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own.  Since I don't want them, why
            should my employer, or anybody else for that matter! 


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