From: Michael Neumann <mneumann@...>
Date: 2005-06-28T03:31:40+09:00
Subject: Re: [Project Idea] RCM - A Ruby Configuration Management System

Am Monday 27 June 2005 19:42 schrieb Ryan Leavengood:
> Michael Neumann said:
> > Is there anyone interested in joining a project that aims at creating a
> > Monotone (www.venge.net/monotone) inspired distributed configuration
> > management system in Ruby?
>
> It sounds interesting. I'd need to read more about monotone and do some
> comparisions with other system, but this does make me wonder: do we really
> need ANOTHER version control system? Based on the page on the Monotone
> site (http://www.venge.net/monotone/others.html) there are already a ton
> (and that list is just the free ones.)

You're right. There are for sure many good enough version control systems. The 
best I ever used was OpenCM (www.opencm.org), but development has 
discontinued. Monotone comes close to OpenCM. But then I heard (and 
confirmed) that checking out the Monotone repository takes ~90 minutes. This 
and the simplicity of the Monotone model inspired me in writing my own ;-)

Some personal comments about the other versioning systems:

Subversion: the hell from an administrative point of view. you need shell 
accounts for each commiter, or you accept that the data goes unencrypted over 
the wire, or you setup an Apache with all the required modules, and chown the 
whole repository to the www user.

Darcs: Very nice, but using it as a central repository requires again local 
machine permissions.

OpenCM: Uses cryptography to ensure data integrity. Easy to administrate, as 
users and groups are managed by the repository (no unix access rights 
required). Advanced features were planned (but never integrated into the 
downloadable version): Disconnected Commits, Replication.

Monotone: Uses cryptography for data integrity. Unlike OpenCM, this is a 
distributed system.

> But at the same time there are tons of web frameworks and Rails is
> certainly an improvement on many of them...
>
> So if you move forward with this, contact me as I could probably help out.

Great! There are lots of small tasks to do, but very little time to do it all 
myself.

Regards,

  Michael