Re: Subversion

On 7/1/05, Nikolai Weibull
<[e-mail]> wrote:
> Austin Ziegler wrote:
>> On 7/1/05, mathew <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> Millions of times? Apparently you don't know how to automate
>>> things properly at the command line.
>> I know plenty well how to automate -- you'd have to find someone
>> who didn't have fifteen years experience on the Unix command-line
>> for your moronic statement to be nearly correct.
> You mean fifteen hours, right, or am I missing something?

Mathew assumed that because I *choose* to work on Windows with
primarily graphical tools that I don't know how to automate on the
Unix command-line. As it happens, I've been automating from the Unix
command-line (adding pushd/popd to ksh environments which didn't
have them, among other things) since 1989, and I teach my Windows
developer counterparts a lot that they don't know about the use --
and power -- of the Windows command-line in XP and 2003. I think
most of the power was in 2000, but I can only comment on XP/2003.

Mathew would have to look elsewhere for someone that doesn't know
about automation. It'd be better if he looked at himself for not
knowing what he's talking about in his zeal to dis Windows.

>>> Anyhow, your religious attachment to your Norton Commander clone
>>> and the rest of your environment isn't really a valid basis for
>>> deciding the source code control system for a worldwide project,
>>> any more than your liking Visual Studio would be a valid basis
>>> for demanding that everyone abandon Makefiles.
>> You can just go back into your zealot's spider hole now. You want
>> to suggest something that makes Windows -- the largest target for
>> Ruby developers -- a second-class or third-class citizen to the
>> rest of Ruby, you've got nothing valuable to say.
> Aren't you pushing it a bit here? I have a hard time seeing that
> Windows is the largest target for Ruby developers. Or are you only
> talking about operating system market share?

Windows has the largest market share, yes. That *also* means that it
has one of the largest pools of developer targets available. There's
been a discussion on ruby-talk about the suitability of Rails vs.
ASP.NET -- and those are mostly Windows developers. Ruby has an
opportunity here, and it's best not to waste it by buying into Unix
zealotry and raising the entry barrier unnecessarily.

>> If there isn't a *native* port of a tool, then there's no support
>> for that tool on the platform in question. Your pretty little
>> arch replacement doesn't cut it until there's a native Windows
>> port. You're welcome to do it; I don't have a need for it.
> What Arch replacement?

Mathew was suggesting Bazaar, an immature replacement for Arch that
doesn't run natively on Windows -- and got downright rude when I
(and others) pointed out that cygwin is not an acceptable answer.
Never has been, never will be.

> My point is this: Switching to Subversion is a poor choice, as it
> doesn't go far away enough from the CVS way of version control.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with that. I personally *prefer*
centralized repositories and strongly dislike decentralized
repositories for a lot of reasons. But there are a lot of well-known
problems with CVS, and it seems more security problems pop up
regularly. Wasn't ruby-lang.org hacked last year through a CVS
vulnerability? SVN seems to be less vulnerable to this, although it
has other problems.

> There are better alternatives on the way, and there's no need to
> rush to the other choice to CVS right now, before the market has
> stabilized a bit.

Until these "better alternatives" work *natively* on Windows,
they're half-baked at best (and, I'll admit, that I mostly care
about client tools, but it would be nice to be able to have the
server run on Windows, too). If you haven't seen the UIs for
TortoiseCVS and TortoiseSVN, you haven't seen how *good* a UI for a
vCS can be, even if it's a command-line-based tool.

[...]

> Anyway, to sum it up, I think that now is a bad time to switch to
> another version control system, as there's a lot going on at the
> moment,

On the other hand, Shugo Maeda pointed out that the version of
Debian they're now using has Subversion and would simplify many of
the headaches that they, as maintainers, are having with CVS.
There's something to be said for that.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * [e-mail]
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