[development] FAQ: Why is Drupal still using CVS when X is a much better choice?

[Victor Kane]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Gordon Heydon <gordon at heydon.com.au> wrote:

Why "head and shoulders above SVN tagging/branching"?

Could you or others making these kinds of assertions possibly justify them?

They are stated as if they were "self-evident truths".

I used SCCS for over a decade on various flavors of Unix.

CVS was then the new kid on the block, and I used that for a decade and a
half.

Then, SVN, with its very functional tagging and branching system,
brilliantly optimized as the economical copying of pointers, have simplified
everything and given much better support for binary files, precision
directory permissions on the group and user level, a system rich in
pre-process and post-process hooks, an API usable by various languages,
WebDav (read-only) for basic browsing...

The whole idea of this thread is to discuss how Drupal can be firmly rooted
in the tools and workflows that real world developers actually use on an
everyday basis, and for good reason; so as to encourage, as webchick wrote,
best practices, and, making Drupal convenient, adoptable...

Larry Garfield has explained how for a small core of users, a distributed
RCS (such as git, mercurial, etc.) could be superior, but SVN is the most
mainstream, is what people actually use.

git is also creating quite a following among single developers (those not
married to a group) who love the "stand alone", local versioning option
while retaining the option to "push" (commit) to a server...

You go out and contract repository hosting, as I do, for $7 / month I get
unlimited repositories with a TRAC instance for each... cool. Most of these
are offering git also.

With GUI's such as TortoiseSVN and RapidSVN, etc.... it just seems the most
attractive and useful way to go.

The only argument against that might make some sense is what Earl Miles said
about it probably being a lot of hard work perhaps better spent on other
worthy core causes.

Yet there is something to be said for using tools people use and for good
reason.

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar



>
>>> Yes this is my major concern with SVN, the total lack of tagging and
>>> branching support.
>>>
>>> Gordon.
>>>
>>
>> This just isn't accurate. Several posts in this discussion - not even
>> all of them being mine - have indirectly or directly explained that svn
>> does have branching/tagging.
>>
>
> Yes it does have very basic tagging/branching but when you compare this is
> git, dvcs, etc and even cvs they are head and shoulders above SVN
> tagging/branching
>
> Gordon.
>
>
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