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

[Karoly Negyesi]

If we move, we move to SVN. My team, consisting of mostly pretty good coders tried a few distributed RCSes and given this experience I am now vehemently against any DRCS. The concepts are way too heavy and the utilities are not ready. Most of these systems are not that mature thus any docs from 1-2 years ago are worthless thus documentation is not much. When I was for a DRCS in 2005/2006 I was a naive greenhorn sorry for the ruckus I caused then, I now know better. 

And back to Drupal contrib, at least with a central repo you can have some central control trying to keep order but with a DRCS all bets are off. Check contrib CVS root for all the crap our CVS challenged contributors add there and think what would ensue with a DRCS.

It's highly debatable that the most serious of our problems, namely understanding RCS would be solved by any DRCS. You sure want to explain multiple heads for one or patch algebra for another? How does 140+ commands sound (and then some has one or two superb powerful switches...) This is a terrible mess.

Now, with SVN we wll need a script to stop tagged things from being changed because they are not immutable as they were in CVS -- but this is readily available and this is the only problem I am aware of. SVN concepts are mapping much better to reality -- one dir per branch/tag. Makes it (much) easier to understand. You already keep a separate directory for your branches so that's how the repository looks like, easy! Thus it _will_ solve some problems -- another problem with DRCS that it does nto solve the problems we have :) SVN tools are available. SVN is mature and documentation is plentiful. svn 1.5 added merge tracking for (much) better team work.

Feature foo and bar might be unavailable for SVN but I can not care , we need something that we, we all of the Drupal community can use. 

Once the reboot of my life is complete (read: September) I will rejoin the moving effort and help.