[TriLUG] Alternatives to CVS

[Michael Alan Dorman]

Tanner Lovelace <lovelace at wayfarer.org> writes:
> There's some debate, however, over whether a central repository
> vs. multiple distributed repositories is the way to go.  I would
> maintain that for almost anything an individual user would want to
> do, a central repository is much more appropriate.  And, if that's
> the case, then I'd suggest looking at subversion.  (See
> http://subversion.tigris.org/) It works quite well and fixes all
> of the little niggling problems with CVS.

I dunno.  I worked with subversion for quite a while last year, and I
really, really wanted to like it (and, incidentally, got totally sick
of Tom Lord; he was becoming somewhat RMS like in that he would show
up whenever version control was mentioned and launch off into a long
harangue) but Berkeley DB kept stuffing up and I got quite frustrated.

Admittedly, with bdb-4.2 and svn-1.0, that's probably resolved.

And then I tried tla, and I gotta say, there are rough edges and
places where it's performance isn't optimal, but, honestly, those are
cosmetic details that can be addressed over time---the basics have, I
think, been thought out much more carefully than subversion.

That the first version could be implemented as a shell script (how's
that for the Software Tools mentality at work!), and produced archives
that are still usable with the latest tools is amazing.  I mean, try
that with subversion, where it felt like I was dumping and reloading
the db ever two weeks; yeah, it hadn't hit an official release, but
doesn't that make you wonder how well they thought it all out in
advance?

And, finally, for personal projects, I'd argue that tla's a *lot*
lighter weight.

For instance, you can host a read-write arch repository on a remote
machine that doesn't have arch installed at all, just ftp or sftp or,
(if you're into masochism), a webdav server; read-only is even easier,
just point a web server at it---try that with subversion, where you
will, at the very least, need it's svn-over-ssh server component on
the far end for read-write access.  And don't even get me started on
the apache2 thing.

Surgery on an arch archive involves regular old Unix filesystem tools,
not db-recover and 'svn admin dump' and so forth.

Now I will say that there are two big issues with arch/tla: not as
much documentation of as high a quality as svn, and it's not trying to
be "a better cvs"---it's trying to reimagine the core of what we think
of as version control, so it does many things that seem odd to someone
used to CVS.  Now that I've acclamatized, though, I'm quite happy.

Of course, Your Mileage Will Almost Certainly Vary.

Mike
-- 
Me, Slinky Redfoot and our trusty angel girls -- Steely Dan