Re: version control and LIP

I did some further reading, and it does appear (to me at least) that there is a lot of overlap conceptually between darcs and arch. Not in terms of implementation, but in terms of goals. An interesting problem is thus: how to we support darcs without mucking up the works for CVS (& co.) users, and v.v. Seth Ketil Malde wrote:

Sven Panne writes:

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Very true. I'm not against anything new when it really solves a problem, but I'm strictly against something simply *because* it's new.

"There are two kinds of fool: one who says this is old, and therefore good, and one who says this is new, and therefore better."

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I've seen quite a few baroque VC and build systems in companies which no one could understand as whole, because so many tools were involved

I'm not sure this applies to the discussion, whether you use Arch, Darcs, or Subversion, they are all fairly self contained, independent of surrounding tools, and from what I've seen of them, at least as easy to understand as CVS.

I'd be more worried about robustness and maturity.

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bit of sh could have done the jobs easily. So what I'm proposing is: "Keep it simple." And CVS *is* simple, we all use it daily...

CVS may be simple for you if you use it daily. Some things are unnecessarily complicated, though: moving/renaming, branching, and merging, to mention a few. CVS is also has a bit of a threshold for contributions from "casual" users.

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What I'd like to hear is the set of needs we have, and if we really agree on them. For my part, I'm quite happy with the development models supported by CVS/Subversion, but there are surely other opinions. After we've reached a conclusion on our needs and goals, we should look for a technical solution, not the other way round.

I've been using Subversion a bit, and am generally happy with it. It does branching neatly, but merging is a bit painful still, and requires the user to work out exactly which versions the changes he wants to merge occurred between. Move/rename is better than CVS, but tends to clutter the history a bit. And, I almost forgot, it lets you do a lot more operations locally than CVS, without needing online access to the repo.

What's great about Darcs is that the threshold for new users to submit patches is very low, if I 'get' the LIP repo and fix a bug, it's very easy for me to 'push' that change (and only that one); the patch will get mailed back to the repository address, where an official maintainer can apply and test it before he integrates it into the official repo. No need to have any special commit access. And of course it's distributed, so it lets individual developers 'pull' patches from each other's repositories/working directories without involving any central repository.

-kzm (I've got a loaded tomato here, and I'm not afraid to use it :-)