The reason (I believe) that you tend to get such a wide range of opinions in this area is that there is not a single common set of needs. For some situations CVS is great, for others it is simply dreadful, and those who have only experienced it in one environment or the other have very different impressions. Of course, most projects are at neither extreme, and for these projects CVS is perceived has having small weaknesses, or larger weaknesses, depending the specifics. I think the broadest line of variation is the issue of whether a centralized repository is a good thing, a bad thing, or something in between. Certainly situations where the centralization of repositories causes problems are prime candidates for paridigms other than CVS/subversion. (It is possible to decentralize repositories with add on products but if we start talking about those the discussion will expand astronomically.) If I am correct, and it is the nature of the problem space rather than the nature of the tool that is important, then Haskell should lean towards supporting a variety of tools and not requiring any particular one. Seth Kurtzberg Ian Lynagh writes:
(I am not a CVS expert)
On Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 02:37:52PM +0100, Sven Panne wrote:
It has some small weaknesses, but those are well-known and most of them are solved by CVS' "younger brother" Subversion,
Part of the problem is that, like make, the CVS issues can't easily be fixed by an evolutionary process but are small enough that there is a lot of resistance against a revolutionary change from people because of the ubiquitousness of the tools and the ersonal investment people have made in learning how they work (and how to get around their quirks!). However, this leads to a situation where we are stuck with the issues for all time. It seems to me the sensible thing for the long term is to make the jump.
It has been my experience that switching from CVS to darcs was not any harder than to subversion despite the latter having a closer philosophy to CVS, so if you are going to move away from CVS then I would advocate moving straight to where you want to end up.
Tools and support for the newer players is already appearing, and the faster people get interested in them and start using them the faster it will come. This is probably especially true for Haskell people and darcs.
I think it would be great for the fptools repo to migrate to one of the new generation at some point in the future, and I think Simon Marlow has talked about this in the past. For the Haskell community to get experience with them on these smaller subprojects, both to be ready for when the change happens and to see which best suits our community, can only be a good thing IMO.
I also think that getting Haskell used by projects in the Real World is also a Good Thing, and is worth supporting where possible.
Finally, it is of course possible to synch repositories of the various systems with CVS. I'm told this is already possible for tla, and it is being worked on for darcs.
Thanks Ian
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