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Re: gEDA-dev: why not use CVS for every development branch?
On Wednesday 13 December 2006 01:01, Carlos Nieves Ónega wrote:
> This raises a new question to all the development group: what's the
> reason to have a private versioning system for developing? Why don't use
> the official server?
CVS is broken, is the reason. It's incredibly inflexible, it's slow, it
doesn't support anything resembling changesets, and the branching system is
baroque.
For everyone to create their own CVS branches for every little change they
want to make would fill the CVS server with cruft. I frequently make several
discrete changes to a branch before I submit it as a patch, even when it's
quite a simple (~100 line u-diff) change, and I want to put them in revision
control. If everyone did that on the CVS server, the logs would quickly get
so bogged down with dead tags and decaying branches as to become unusable
(I've seen it on at least one other project).
I switched to git for my personal projects after having struggled with CVS for
several years. Yes, it's possible to get CVS to work properly if you're very
careful and don't make any mistakes, but no-one is perfect and a little
mistake with CVS is very hard to correct.
git on the other hand:
* Lets you have the complete history and changelog available without having
to communicate continuously with a remote server (so you can do things like
git-blame quickly)
* Supports atomic commits and changesets so you can see who changed what when
without messing around tools like cvsps
* Is _designed_ for work with multiple branches and continuous merging of
lots of different trees
The problems we're experiencing now are a good example of the *reason* that
the Linux and Xorg projects moved away from using CVS to using distributed
version control systems (first BitKeeper, now git).
Anyway, I'm not saying that it would be a good thing to just switch to git
immediately without any further thought/discussion, but I am creating a git
mirror of the gaf CVS, as I said in my other e-mail. Since this will just be
a clone of the CVS server, it will be a perfectly acceptable base for people
to work patches against. As I said, I'll post a follow-up with more
specifics soon.
Cheers,
Peter
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