Re: Subversion for DF sources

[Garance A Drosihn <drosih@xxxxxxx>]

At 3:43 PM +1100 1/12/06, Nigel Weeks wrote:
> A week or so ago, a discussion rattled around about cvsup
> being written in c++.

Some comments on this part of your message:  FreeBSD already has
a side project to rewrite cvsup in C (plain C, not C++).  Right
now this is not a full featured replacement, but it works.  It is
called 'csup', and is in the freebsd projects repo (which is a
separate repository from the base-system repo, and separate from
freebsd-ports).

For my own purposes, 'csup' is not a complete-enough replacement
for 'CVSup', but I expect it's a much better starting point than
several thousand lines of modula-3 and an empty C++ source file.

At the *exact* same time that the 'csup' project was first being
worked on, it happens that I was paying an RPI grad student to do
a rewrite of CVSup, and that work was in C++ (because that's the
language he had the most programming experience with).  Once we
found out that two projects were going on, we kinda compared notes
and at that time it seemed like the 'csup' project was farther
along than mine, so I cancelled mine.  I could probably dig up
that code if you're really keen on a C++ rewrite, but I'm not sure
how much of a help it would be.  (I am not a C++ programmer...)

> What about launching into it, and moving to subversion instead?
> That way, the updater could be included in the base system, as
> it's c++ AND BSD licenced.
>
> Probably great scads or work, but it might be a good idea.

I like subversion.  Other developers have become attached to other
SCM systems.  Everyone hates CVS, but they all know CVS so it's
often easier to stick with CVS than to fight out what should
replace it...  Everyone knows CVS sucks, but they also know it has
a long reliable track record, and they know how to "live with" the
parts of CVS where it sucks.  More and more significant projects
(such as samba) are switching to subversion, but it still doesn't
have quite the track record that CVS has.

I'm a little confused with your comment of "What about launching
into it, and using subversion instead?".  If you want to launch into
a rewrite of CVSup, then why would you *also* switch to subversion?
Did you mean:  "What about *NOT* launching into a CVSup rewrite, and
moving to subversion instead?"

There is also an OpenCVS being worked on from members of the OpenBSD
group, which would give you CVS with a BSD license.  I know they plan
to be "completely CVS compatible -- plus important new features!",
but I have no idea if this would give you a CVSup-like ability.  And
obviously, this doesn't actually exist as a as a usable alternative
yet.  Of course, if you're going to write something from scratch, than
what you have doesn't exist yet either, so you can't really claim that
as an advantage over OpenCVS...

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@xxxxxxx