what’s the deal with svn? i seriously don’t understand why we are switching to it. basically everyone knows that we need to be using git or bzr (i don’t even care which one).
so seriously. someone please explain to me why we start using svn even though we all know it’s not the correct (final) solution.
ps: i like cvs just fine :)
Well, maybe it’s a good time to sanitize the existing repos and their history.
Besides it, I think Mercurial (http://selenic.com/mercurial) should be taken into account. It’s as fast as git, is more space efficient without repacking and has a much saner UI besides being truly multiplatform, like bzr.
Mercurial is not a freak system, as is being used for the Solaris, Xen or Intel ACPI projects, and has been used to make free Java a reality.
IMHO, git has a big problem: it doesn’t work on win32, and that’s a huge problem both for translators, or for any developers that try to maintain the parts of the stack that can run on other systems than *nix.
Anything departing too much from CVS/SVN usage model is a huge problem for (hundreds of) translators/documentors who simply don’t care about this stuff, but would rather do some work.
Alternative to SVN would be, in my opinion, to provide better interfaces for such non-code contributions, when scm could really be selected based on technical merits.
Besides git, bzr and mercurial there is also Monotone and darcs. So which one do you choose?
Subversion is a good move, it fixes some immediate problems that we have without committing us to the absolute latest and greatest in revision control which we may not be able to migrate away from. Conversely, everyone will offer a migration path from Subversion.
It’s worth noting that bzr has a feature to pull from SVN repos, and deal with it as a bzr repo until you push it back. That should offer many of the features that you’re after from bzr (I haven’t used it yet).
Git can be used on win32, only not on a fat partition.
Popularity and usability may be low on some peoples list of priorities but the use of Subversion by a wide range of projects has benefits. Using the same revision control system as KDE in particular (and to a lesser extent sourceforge and other sites like Google code) makes it easier for casual developers to submit small patches to Gnome without being asked to learn yet another system.
> ps: i like cvs just fine :)
You aren’t the only one. Many smaller applications directly implemented support for CVS without thinking about future proofing their work with a few well placed abstractions. Allowing older programs to interface with these newer systems (perhaps through some kind of gateway) and have read only access such as checkout and diff would go a long way to allow users like translators to carry on as normal would be a huge help, especially if they are using third party tools or scripts (eg TortoiseSVN http://tortoisesvn.net).
Mikael, git can be used on win32, if you have a full cygwin environment and an NTFS partition. That’s not reasonable because: you normally use fat32 partitions to be able to share data between your GNU/Linux system and your win32 one, and you only want a VCS, and not having to install a cygwin layer just for it.
All-in-all, I think the move to SVN is a good one, and we’ll have time to reevaluate a move to a DVCS later, when all systems are more mature (graphical frontends, better end user documentation, and so).