[ Slowly redirecting to the cvs-fptools list... ] Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote:
On 20050501T202815+0200, Sven Panne wrote:
So my question in a nutshell: Why shall we move away from the mainstream when the rest of the world (or most of) is quite happy with CVS or is moving to subversion?
Do you have evidence for your presupposition?
Yes, I have tons of empirical evidence: There are many projects which are much larger than fptools (like KDE or GNOME, all the GNU stuff on Savannah) which exclusively use CVS, others use CVS but move to Subversion in the near future (like gcc), there is a comparison of Open Source hosting sites at http://www.ibiblio.org/fosphost/exhost.htm (only CVS and Subversion are used) etc. So either all those thousands of people in these projects are silly and/or ignorant or fptools is so much different...
My read of the situation is that CVS is old and rusty, and while many people have not noticed it, many have; those that have noticed it, are looking for a replacement - and there are several contenders, subversion being the oldest but not by any means dominant.
Don't get me wrong: I am quite aware of the limitations of CVS and I would *never* start a fresh project with CVS. But Subversion is a very worthy successor and being "the oldest" as you mentioned is a definite plus in the mission-critical area of version management systems. I don't want to start a version management jihad, I just want to understand and discuss the reasons for the plan mentioned by SimonM to move fptools to darcs. For our concrete project: In which respects (i.e. use cases) is darcs better than Subversion? There is no silver bullet for version management, everything depends on the intended use cases and the development model, see e.g. http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-linus.html. Cheers, S.