Where is FreeBSD going?

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Roman Neuhauser wrote:

>     [1] has core@ considered subversion (devel/subversion)?

Everyone has their eyes wide open looking for a revision control
alternative, but last time it was discussed in detail (a few months ago?)
it seemed there still wasn't a viable alternative.  On the src tree side,
FreeBSD committers are making extensive use of a Perforce repository
(which supports lightweight branching, etc, etc), but there's a strong
desire to maintain the base system on a purely open source revision
control system, and migrating your data is no lightweight proposition. 
Likewise, you really want to trust your data only to tried and true
solutions, I think -- we want to build an OS, not a version control
system, if at all possible :-).  Subversion seems to be the current
"favorite" to keep an eye on, but the public release seemed not to have
realized the promise of the design (i.e., no three-way merges, etc).  You
can peruse the FreeBSD Perforce repository via the web using
http://perforce.FreeBSD.org/ -- it contains a lot of personal and small
project sandboxes that might be of interest. For example, we do all the
primary TrustedBSD development in Perforce before merging it to the main
CVS repository. 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research