On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 5:37 PM, Michael Banck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 10:34:41PM +0200, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote: >> I like the idea. >> >> It would lower the barrier to begin coding on the hurd (I think), and it >> would >> be a good opportunity to clean up the cvs chaos a bit (so newcomers don't get >> completely lost in the different repositories). >> >> Also it has the advantage to remove the central point of failure, which feels >> very Hurd-like to me: Everyone has a full copy of the repository, and only >> the reference repository is under central control. > > Well, CVS is certainly doomed, but I don't think the above two points > are strong arguments. Probably gnumach-1-branch should be moved back to > HEAD, yes, but otherwise, the CVS looks pretty decent to me (note that > glibc still manages to use CVS, which is a far bigger project commit and > code-wise). > > Also, a central repo is not much of a SPOF, if Savannah goes down with > all its backups, we got bigger problems than worrying about the Hurd I > guess. >
I agree, the two points aren't the reason why I'm asking about this. Distributed version control would let people work offline; which is always a plus. More importantly any modern version control system makes branches trivial. We already have a few branches, and there was talk of having one per SoC student. Integrating all of those won't be fun with cvs. It also makes development easier because I can just pull patches from people that I am interested in. For example I would like some /proc support, which another student is implementing, for part of my project. Doing this with cvs is a nightmare. There's also the fact that moving to something like git is easy and we don't lose history doing it. Since it's a rather simple change, aside from the fact that people would have to learn a new set of commands, which is a few minutes of work, it seems worthwhile given all the benefits.