Stas Bekman wrote:
While it's sort of OK for us developers to figure it out, quite often we ask users to get a fresh "cvs-r.i.p." checkout and we won't want to make them jumping through hoops, there is enough pain they have to endure.
Well, you already need to run 'perl Makefile.PL' in order to build, right? Why not stick some code in there that looks for the Apache-Test stuff you need and if it isn't there (and you're in an svn working copy) do the switch?
So what's the forecast for svn:externals, is it planned to be fixed, and how soon?
I don't personally have any plans to fix it, and I don't know of any other Subversion developers who do in the immediate future. There are some plans as to how it could be made to work better, but at this point that's all it is, plans. As usual in open source projects something gets fixed when someone is motivated to fix it, and most of the developers do not seem to make heavy use of externals, thus they are devoting their time to other issues, like locking support and merge tracking.
What bothers me the most is that when we asked whether modperl will be OK moved to svn, the answer was: "yes of course, everything is ready". Now we discover lots of broken/missing things. And unfortunately I find that the move to svn was really rushed and unjustifiable. In fact I'd prefer to see things reverted to cvs at least until after we get mp2.0 out, but that's too late in the game and we depend on Apache-Test which is now under svn without a question.
It seems that mod_perl2 is making use of some features (specifically pulling in other parts of the repository) that other Apache projects just don't make much use of. I agree that the transition could certainly have gone smoother if some more thought had been put into it beforehand, and some more information distributed to the developers as to what life post-conversion would be like, as opposed to the "you'll figure out it" kind of thing that seems to have happened.
That said, I don't think any of the problems you've got are insurmountable. If you can figure out a way to work around the few remaining problems I think you'll be ok.
I also find it interesting to see the different reactions in different ASF projects I keep an eye on as they convert. APR and HTTPD, for example, don't seem to have any real problems with the conversion, while mod_perl seems to keep running into issues. I guess it's just different projects having different usage patterns for the software.
-garrett
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
