On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 10:19 -0700, Derek Wright wrote:
On Jul 31, 2008, at 3:42 AM, Karoly Negyesi wrote:
If we move, we move to SVN.
On Jul 31, 2008, at 4:04 AM, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
Well, then we just can stay with CVS. IMO SVN's features aren't that vastly superior to spend much effort on moving.
On Jul 31, 2008, at 9:01 AM, Earl Miles wrote:
This is my concern with SVN. Its idea of tagging and branching is naive and I find it confusing and also intensive when I end up checking out all the tags unintentionally. It seems like it would be difficult to translate our current tagging system to SVN and I am concerned that the amount of work to do so would be wasted effort. IMO, we have a lot more important problems to solve than this.
In that case...
Ahhh! It's not the case! I've been trying to put out these fires as fast as I can, but I can only type so fast :) I've personally done cvs to svn migrations before, and they do take considerable care and effort, but they're not impossible. Plus, as I've said in a few emails already, the tagging/branching system _is_ mature (quite a bit more so than CVS, in fact), it's just more flexible and we'd need to tailor it. Not like we ever tell anybody that about drupal or anything... :P Also, as a specific response to Earl - inadvertently checking out everything from svn is no easier or harder than cvs. It's just different. It's the default trunk/ branches/ tags/ that tends to cause inadvertent enormous checkouts like that, and folks accustomed to cvs are more likely to do it. Fortunately, since that repo layout isn't hard-coded into svn, we could take steps to reduce that confusion by making the layout more familiar to cvs users.
we're exactly where we've been for at least the last 2 years. This comes as no surprise at all, and why I've never had much of a sense of urgency about this situation. To summarize:
- DVCS is relatively new, immature, and very complicated. The basic level of understanding among Drupal developers of even simple VCS and release management 101 is so low that a DVCS would produce vastly more problems than it would solve. At least for the foreseeable future, DVCS is out of reach for the overall Drupal developer community. Maybe in N years when the tools are more mature, the documentation is better, and more people have gained knowledge of DVCS concepts in other areas of their technical lives, we can reopen this part of the thread.
- The only viable traditional VCS alternative to CVS is SVN, which only has minor feature improvements, and has a serious conceptual drawback with its naive tagging semantics.
Therefore, a switch away from CVS will require massive effort for little or no gain.
Shall I update Angie's FAQ to summarize this state of affairs? Can we put this thread to rest for another 2 years?
Cheers, -Derek (dww)
p.s. Sam, please don't let that stop you from taking over versioncontrol_api. That'd still be a good thing for project*, even if d.o isn't using SVN or git. ;)
No worries :) As I said in the caveat of my initial response here, I'm just providing information, not advocating. Really, even if it doesn't sound like it at times :P. I've already taken over vcs api, and will be doing what's needed there regardless of how all these decisions play out. cheers, s