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

[Derek Wright]

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, 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. ;)