not SVN? (was: An introduction of the new cheerleader...)

[Tyler larson]

On Tue, 2004-01-27 at 09:48, Cristian Gafton wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Alexander L. Belikoff wrote:
> 
> > Hmm... I thought RedHat was going the way of early adoption of SVN?.. *This*  
> > could be the perfect moment to start eating our own dogfood. ;-)
> 
> There is going to be plenty of time to play with alternative solutions 
> once we have in place at least one. Every solution has its supporters and 
> opposition, and we're not going to get unanimity no matter what.
> 
> I happen to know CVS and I think that most people are familiar with CVS. 
> It is not perfect, it has its faults, but its faults are widely known. I 
> can take few days to put out the CVS server or I can take few weeks to 
> review other solutions that I'm not that familiar with. I'd rather have 
> the CVS out.

I agree with both of you. Nearly every Linux developer has used CVS at
some point and is probably as familiar with it as they are with other
common tools like make. And we (the non-redhat developers) really,
really need a project server we can use. I'd say set up the CVS server
tonight, but don't stop there. 

CVS is pretty seriously flawed, but we've learned to work around it.
It's faults are widely know, yes, but they're still in the way. It's
better than nothing, but it's worse than many of its alternatives. It's
mature, but it's maturely broken, and it's not ever going to get better.
There's really no reason for us to stick with it any longer than we have
to.

Subverion is a great program. It's being worked on pretty heavily, so if
you haven't looked at it recently, you're missing a lot of the picture.
It's efficient, it's stable, it does right what CVS does wrong, and it's
already impressively widely adopted and heavily relied-on. The learning
curve going from CVS to SVN is minimal. Once the CVS server is running,
set up a parallel SVN server (on the same machine if you want), and let
the developers choose where to host their project. 

While I realize it's better to use only one versioning system than
having the projects split between two, splitting between two versioning
systems is better still than sticking with just CVS; and I think this is
the best way for us to start the migration.