Subversion? (Re: HEADS UP: Importing csup into base)

[Ollivier Robert]

According to Peter Wemm:
> Like perforce, it is fully client/server, but it has some considerable 
> advantages over perforce:
> 
> 1) It has fairly good detached operation modes.  You can do logs, diffs, 
> reverts, etc while detached.  It does this by keeping metadata and a 
> small number of revisions cached locally.

In my opinion, it is not enough.  You can't svn commit on a detached mode.
You can't work as if you were connected, commit several csets, go back one
and so on.  That's too limiting.

> 5) And this is the kicker..  most client metadata is kept on the client!  
> This is the very reason why we cannot use perforce for freebsd.org for 
> everybody.  The number of checkouts is way too large.  svn keeps most 
> of this on the client, so this scales easily with more clients.

Including a full copy of all files and more metadata. The inode count for
/usr/ports would be even worse than Mercurial (which is already big but we
have *full* history and disconnected ops).

And someone is working on a better way to store data in a Mercurial repo
which will save us thousands of inodes at some CPU expense. First tests on
this indicates at least a 50% saving on disk space for the .hg directory
and far less inodes consummed.

> The comments about svn's lack of branch merge memory make me a bit 
> nervous though.  We've had brahcnes that have been incrementally merged 
> hundreds of times under perforce, and the lack of remembering which 
> revisions have and have not been merged would be sorely missed.

Yes.

> And my personal observation is that svn finally seems to be becoming the 
> defacto replacement for cvs, at last.  It has picked up some very high 
> profile projects - gcc for one, asterisk, etc etc.  I'm sure it will 
> improve at an even faster rate now.

Xen is using Mercurial, OpenSolaris is evaluating it along other dVCS too.
-- 
Ollivier ROBERT -=- FreeBSD: The Power to Serve! -=- roberto at keltia.freenix.fr
Darwin snuadh.freenix.org Kernel Version 7.9.0: Wed Mar 30 20:11:17 PST 2005