Re: Subversion

On Jul 1, 2005, at 6:30 PM, Ryan Davis wrote:
> On Jul 1, 2005, at 3:45 AM, Jeremy Kemper wrote:
>> On Jul 1, 2005, at 1:35 AM, Ryan Davis wrote:
>>> These are all very good points, and with the exception of trac  
>>> (although there is an open bug on this exception), all of these  
>>> points are also supported by perforce.
>>
>> Perforce a great product but it's never appropriate for large- 
>> scale anonymous access due to its heavily-centralized design.  All  
>> metadata is stored on the server.  Even asking what files you've  
>> changed means a server hit.  And then you're stuck with host-based  
>> or SSH auth.
>
> "Never"? You know that when you see that on the SATs and other  
> standardized tests that it is almost always false, right?

Pardon?


>>> Perforce is free for open-source development and is used by  
>>> larger groups like freebsd (http://perforce.freebsd.org/).
>>
>> FreeBSD restricts p4 to committers for the reasons above.  Their  
>> metadata database is ~10GB for only ~120 users, so a beefy server  
>> with lots of RAM is needed just for this modest team.
>
> I don't really see how that is applicable here. 1) we have a much  
> much smaller repo, even after duplicating out all of the branches;  
> 2) ruby has a very sane branch methodology; 3) I worked at a  
> company that had the largest integrate DB (merge metadata) that  
> perforce has ever seen (gawkable in size, it was 6gig alone), and  
> yet the server did fine unless a developer did something truly  
> horrific. This was in a 5m LoC source base tho with 50-100  
> branches. I sat next to the p4 admin. Sure, they made mistakes that  
> caused pain now and then, but most of that is avoidable by #2 above.
>
> I highly doubt we'll ever have a problem.

This is orthogonal: the problem is that the size of the depot scales  
with the number of users accessing it.  The number of files in source  
control is no issue, p4 can handle any project capably.  But each  
clientspec is ~20MB in size, so you are forced to limit access or buy  
a big box *due to the number of clients*, not the size or complexity  
of the repository.

Please, I think Perforce is a good product, but it does have its  
limits and large-scale public access is one of them.  Please pardon  
me for contributing to this errant thread; advocacy is hardly germane  
on -core :)

Best,
jeremy