Public Access to Perforce?

[Geoff Speicher]

Sorry for keeping this thread alive, but...

On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 12:16:50PM -0400, Richard Coleman wrote:
> Robert Watson wrote:
> >Last I looked, my primary concerns with Subversion were:
> >
> >- Cost to import full FreeBSD history.
> >
> >- That it promised the multi-way branching and merging in a future 
> >release, but did not yet have it.
> >
> >Do you know how things look with respect to the second issue?
> >
> >Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects 
> >robert at fledge.watson.org      Principal Research Scientist, McAfee
> >Research
> 
> Reading the ChangeLog for the upcoming subversion-1.1 release, it 
> doesn't look like it.
> 
> http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/CHANGES
> 
> My understanding is that the merge functionality in subversion is still 
> about the same that is currently in CVS (although faster).

Saying that the merge functionality is the same is a little misleading.
On paper, it appears the same in that it too lacks a mechanism to help
prevent repeated merges.  In practice, it's much easier because of
the way revision numbers work---across the tree.  This allows you to
use one simple merge command on one revision number to get an whole
set of changes across an entire tree.  We made the switch from CVS to
Subversion at work almost a year ago and never looked back.

Or Robert, do you mean something else by multi-way branching and
merging?

> But there's no denying that subversion is getting better by the day. 
> For a new project, I wouldn't hesitate to suggest subversion.  But for a 
> large, existing project like *BSD there doesn't seem to be a compelling 
> reason to switch (yet).  But that will change eventually.

For a large existing project like FreeBSD where time is a precious
resource, the reasons seem even more compelling.  Subversion provides an
automated solution to much of the manual dog work of CVS... can anyone
say "no more repo-copies"?

Geoff